In the spring of 2026, as international design award announcements came in rapid succession, one Chinese designer's name kept surfacing across multiple independent judging bodies — each with its own standards, each arriving at the same conclusion.
Ding Li, a product designer specializing in healthcare AI and digital health, saw two of her projects recognized with five international design awards within a matter of months: the iF Design Award, Indigo Design Award, New York Product Design Awards, MUSE Design Awards, and GDUSA American Digital Design Awards. The recognized categories span User Experience, Health/Wellness UX, and Digital Design. That these awards come from distinct European and North American judging systems — with no overlap in jury or methodology — makes the pattern difficult to dismiss.
The timing matters. AI is moving fast into clinical and healthcare settings, and the conversation around it tends to focus on capability: what the models can do, how accurate they are, how quickly they can generate a recommendation. What Ding Li's work raises is a different question entirely. The two products she designed — Last Minute, a healthcare workforce scheduling co-pilot, and Furever.AI, an AI-powered pet pre-triage platform — both operate in high-stakes, high-pressure environments where the people using them are often overwhelmed, time-constrained, or emotionally on edge. The design challenge isn't making AI impressive. It's making AI workable for humans who are already stretched thin.
I. Last Minute: Giving Clinicians Back Control of Their Time
Last Minute targets a structural problem that American healthcare has largely learned to live with: clinical scheduling. At Northwestern Medicine, before Last Minute was introduced, coordinating a cross-department shift change meant phone calls — often more than thirty minutes of back-and-forth for a single adjustment. The inefficiency was visible and measurable. The deeper cost was harder to quantify: a pervasive sense among clinical staff that they had no real agency over their own time. That sustained loss of control is well-documented as a driver of clinician burnout.
Ding Li led the core UX design work on Last Minute. The redesigned system allows clinicians to submit scheduling preferences on a quarterly basis; the AI uses those inputs to generate a baseline schedule, which administrators then review and adjust. When a last-minute vacancy opens, the system simultaneously notifies multiple qualified candidates — eliminating the phone tree entirely. The result: average scheduling adjustment time dropped from over thirty minutes to a matter of minutes.
In conversation, Ding Li described the central tension she had to navigate in designing the system:
"The hardest part of healthcare product design isn't the technical implementation — it's finding genuine balance between two very different user groups. You have to meaningfully improve efficiency for administrators, while making sure clinicians don't feel like their preferences and rhythms are being overridden by the system. Those two goals are often in direct conflict."
That dual accountability — building something that works for both without sacrificing either — is precisely what earned Last Minute its iF recognition. The award isn't ceremonial; iF evaluates against real-world deployment, and Last Minute's case rested on an actual clinical implementation at Northwestern Medicine.
II. Furever.AI: Can Design Hold Someone Together in a Moment of Crisis?
If Last Minute optimizes an institutional process, Furever.AI operates in something closer to an emotional emergency. It's an AI pre-triage platform for pet owners in North America — people who open the app because their animal is visibly unwell and they don't know what to do next. Distress is the default state of the user. Design has to function inside that.
Ding Li served as design lead on Furever.AI, driving the project from research through delivery. She oversaw in-depth interviews with both pet owners and veterinary professionals, developed the overall information architecture and interaction framework, established the visual system, and maintained design consistency and quality across all product stages. The project received four international awards in 2026: the Indigo Design Award Gold, New York Product Design Awards Silver, MUSE Design Award Silver, and the GDUSA American Digital Design Award.
That these four recognitions come from distinct judging bodies — spanning the United States and Europe — speaks to the design's overall completeness. The Indigo Gold is particularly notable: the Apps for Digital Design category sets a high bar for coherence across interaction logic, information architecture, and visual system, and the Gold designation is historically awarded sparingly.
Like Last Minute, Furever.AI is built around a two-sided user problem. Pet owners need rapid, clear decision support at a moment of anxiety; veterinarians need structured, accurate intake information they can actually act on. Building an information pathway that genuinely serves both without compromising either was the central design problem — and the one the judges appear to have found most convincingly solved.
III. Beyond the Awards: What She Thinks Design Is Actually For in an AI Era
Last Minute and Furever.AI look different on the surface — different industries, different user types, different emotional registers. But their underlying logic is the same. Both operate under conditions of information asymmetry and high stakes. Both require design to create a clear path to action amid competing interests. Both rely on AI as a core capability while refusing to let AI become the center of gravity.
This, perhaps, is what has distinguished Ding Li's work from the broader field of AI product design: she doesn't treat AI as the destination. She treats it as something that needs to be shaped, constrained, and made useful — a tool that serves the design, rather than a feature that drives it.
On the question of AI and the designer's role — one of the more contested conversations in the industry right now — her position is direct:
"I don't think AI will replace designers. But it will redefine where designers actually add value. What becomes genuinely scarce is judgment and taste — knowing what should be done and what shouldn't. That's not something AI can do."
Ding Li continues to focus her practice on healthcare AI and digital health product design, and remains actively engaged in international design discourse. Five awards in a single year is a meaningful marker. It is, by her own account, a chapter note rather than a conclusion — the beginning of a longer effort to build AI products that are actually good for the people who use them, in conditions that are complex, real, and unforgiving.