Siming Cybercreative is a Boston-area design studio founded by principal designer and innovation strategist Janet Si-Ming Lee. We always aspire to develop strategic and unique creative concepts that are enlightened and inspired. Simply Ming.
About Janet:
As a MITX (Massachusetts Innovation Technology Exchange) award-nominated Sr. UX / UI designer and innovation strategist, I work with startups, small businesses, and global brands in ideating, optimizing, and scaling existing product lines. I apply design thinking as a framework for uncovering consumer and market trends for insights into creative solutions. I love ideating possibilities with my clients to tap into new markets. I've even had clients change their business plans after my consultations or they may later apply my ideas into their roadmap for future Northstar project scopes. I help market and elucidate the value of my client's services. Architecting meaning. Designing enlightened experiences, I help to make your business plans come to life.
As a MITX (Massachusetts Innovation Technology Exchange) award-nominated Sr. UX / UI designer and innovation strategist, I work with startups, small businesses, and global brands in ideating, optimizing, and scaling existing product lines. I apply design thinking as a framework for uncovering consumer and market trends for insights into creative solutions. I love ideating possibilities with my clients to tap into new markets. I've even had clients change their business plans after my consultations or they may later apply my ideas into their roadmap for future Northstar project scopes. I help market and elucidate the value of my client's services. Architecting meaning. Designing enlightened experiences, I help to make your business plans come to life.
With AI's ability to quickly execute, the future of design lies in the quality and relevance of visionary ideas to each company's specific product strengths and brand positioning. While visionary ideations are the transformative value-add, my end-to-end design solutions from UX wireframes to high-fidelity visual designs are often my concrete deliverables as proof-of-concepts for user-testing or available for a quick website deployment. Hence, I provide quality, customer-focused, and affordable responsive mobile web and visual design solutions to help you then visualize these new or existing business services and market them.
I have over 15 years of professional experience in UX / UI product design, eCommerce, innovation ideation, IA, content strategy, discovery research, competitive analyses, brand positioning, lead gen, logo / brand design, illustration, graphic arts and visual design. I create wireframes, interactive prototypes, high-fidelity visuals, design systems for personas-driven responsive mobile websites and native apps. I leverage a combination of Boston Globe award-winning illustration and fine arts sensibility with comprehensive user-centric eCommerce and product design experience across industries to deliver insightful creative solutions.
I've worked and consulted for Fortune 500 companies, startups, government, creative agencies, and nonprofits for projects in edTech, healthTech, fintech, travel, news, consumer goods. Clients have included the Boston Globe, Monster Worldwide, TripAdvisor / Viator, McGraw-Hill Education, Savvas (formerly Pearson’s K-12), EBSCO Learning, Barnes & Noble College (BNED), Weight Watchers, Dunkin' Donuts, Panera Bread, Ogilvy PR Worldwide, New England Baptist Hospital, Kaiser Permanente, PBS, Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence (ATASK), Company One Theatre, MIT Sloan School, Wellesley Centers for Women, Intuit, State Street, Citigroup, and the US Army.
I earned a B.A. with Honors at Wellesley College, pioneering a media arts and communications interdisciplinary major that included undergrad courses in web design, eCommerce and marketing at MIT. I also studied a breadth of subjects that offer me holistic and entrepreneurial insights into user experiences including personality psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, health economics, Chinese economy, biology. In my MIT eCommerce class co-taught by legendary professors John Little and Erik Brynjolfsson, I studied the role of disintermediation and reintermediation in product and service bundling during the dotcom era. I wrote a well-received independent research report on the Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy branding and e-commerce strategy. I analyzed the impact of the rise of eCommerce on traditional brick and mortar commerce and print catalogues as well as brand development for different target audiences and subsidiaries.
Throughout my life, my motto has been — if it doesn't exist yet, create it. As a recent college alumna in the then new field of media arts and inspired by my MIT Media Lab course, I envisioned extending the college partnership between Wellesley and MIT into joint alumni creative collaborations post-college. Also, at the time, I was working for a dotcom startup and realized other recent alumni like me could appreciate a trusted professional development community to learn independently from our startup jobs with limited training. Hence, I founded and led professional development network for Wellesley and MIT creative and hi-tech professionals, entrepreneurs, consultants for a decade. I created strategic programming agenda and led dinner discussions with guest speakers that included CEOs and professors on educational topics e.g. lead gen marketing, SEO and social media, evolutionary artificial intelligence, multimedia, consulting, organization in hi-tech startups. I hosted creative salon nights at local cafes and also organized public exhibitions of WAAM projects at the Boston Cyberarts Festival and Somerville Open Studios.
In order to provide more informed and insightful services to my clients, I believe in being a student of life, constantly seeking creative and intellectual inspiration. For example, I delight in international travel, touring art museums, attending educational talks, and reading articles on many different topics for creative and intellectual inspiration. I enjoy learning how to make different multiethnic dishes especially stews to expand my understanding of different spice palettes and sauce creation. I made dishes such as: Filipino adobo chicken, Japanese nasu dengaku, French coq au vin, Egyptian Molukhea, Persian fesenjan, Ethiopian chicken doro wot, West African peanut stew, Belgian waterzooi, etc. In addition, I love hosting regular film night discussions with friends in my Impromptu group as a platform for philosophical analysis of metaphors and thematic content on films that explored artificial intelligence and futurism, Spanish surrealism, linguistics and theories of mind, meta-life contemplations, etc. Films included: Krzysztof Kieślowski's "Trois Couleurs" and "Double Life of Veronique"; Wong Kar Wai's "2046"; Hirokazu Kore-eda's "AfterLife"; Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Shape of Water"; Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise" trilogy; "Midnight in Paris"; "Dorian Gray"; "Triangle of Sadness"; "Poor Things"; "Malcolm X"; "Ex Machina"; "Her", "The Linguists", and more.
I love the intersection of community service, philosophy, cultural arts, and innovation. I was selected by the City of Cambridge to serve as an advisory board member on the Harvard Square Kiosk and Plaza redesign project in competitive bid for project participation. In this role, I provided strategic proposals to the city and documented pedestrian flows and activities for behavioral mapping. I created proposals for business development, event programming, and innovative concepts for reimagining news. I collaborated with fellow board advisors — business association heads and consultants, architects, Harvard and MIT professors, historians, and Neighborhood Association — to establish design guidelines to architects and placemaking consultants.
I look forward to helping you as a company meet your business objectives and innovate to strengthen your service offerings or make the value of your services more transparent. If you are an individual seeking a way to creatively connect your diverse interests into a meaningful new career direction or create a new startup, I would love to apply my experience with startup and global brands to help you actualize your dreams.