Product designer · Milan

Zhengye Liao

My work focuses on the balance between art and function, from everyday objects to products for special uses.
I am based in Milan and studying at Politecnico di Milano.

Experience

2023–NowPolitecnico di MilanoBSc Product Design
2025Artopia GalleryIntern
2026Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste StuttgartExchange, Industrial Design
2023–NowTempio Del Futuro Perduto*Promoter, Resident Artist

Contact Zhengye.Liao@mail.polimi.it

Product

No.ProjectTypeYear

01

NEST Shapeable MagSafe charger, wax and textile 2026 02

Vaporina Steam accessory for Alessi 2025 03

Majiroller Water roller for two children 2025

01ABK Stuttgart · Summer 2026

NEST

Shapeable Charger

A MagSafe phone charger filled with wax, which you press into shape by hand.

Year: 2026
Course: Refill: Designing Energy Rituals, ABK Stuttgart
Type: Product, material research
Material: Wax and mineral oil core, two-way stretch knit, PLA ring, Apple-certified MagSafe module
Size: 105 × 100 × 68 mm, 340 g
Work: Research, sketching, material tests, prototyping, photography

NEST is a charger for a bedside table or a desk. Its core is wax under a knitted cover, so it takes the shape you press into it and then holds the phone at that angle. A MagSafe module, Apple’s magnetic wireless charger for iPhone, sits in a plastic ring on top.

Project documentation (PDF)Technical document (PDF)

Background and goal

You usually check charging on a screen, but charging also makes heat you can feel.

Phones and chargers show charging with numbers, icons and small status lights, so you have to look to know. Heat is different, because you can notice it with your hand without looking. The project set out to make a charger you understand by touch, and it had four goals.

ApproachableIt has no lights and no numbers.
TactileThe surface is soft fabric.
IntuitiveYou adjust it by pressing, not through settings.
PersonalIt keeps the shape you give it.

Prototypes laid out: printed rings, knit and fabric skins, a charging coil and paper templates — Process · rings, skins and cores

Process

Wax was chosen for the core after several skins and fillings were tested.

The tests for the outer skin covered latex, TPU (a flexible plastic), silicone and knitted fabric. The tests for the filling covered magnetic beads, steel balls, a thick liquid and wax. Wax gives way when you press it and then stays put under the weight of a phone. The final core is 250 g of microcrystalline wax mixed with 30 g of mineral oil, sealed in a film bag and covered with a two-way stretch knit. A rigid PLA ring on top holds the MagSafe module, and the USB-C port is set into the side of the ring.

Product

You press the phone to the angle you want, and NEST keeps it there.

This works at room temperature, so the phone can lie almost flat or lean up towards you. While it charges, NEST gets slightly warm. That warmth is the only sign that it is working, because the charger has no light and no screen.

NEST from the front, with its USB-C port — Front · USB-C in the side of the ring

NEST from above, a rigid ring set into blue textile — Top · rigid MagSafe ring

Two hands pressing NEST on a wooden table — Pressed into shape on the table

NEST from behind, cable leaving the ring, phone leaning on it — From behind · cable from the ring

A phone lying flat on NEST — Phone lying flat

A phone tilted back on NEST — Phone tilted back

NEST charging a phone through its USB-C cable — Plugged into the ring

A hand setting a phone onto NEST on a wooden table

NEST cupped in a palm above a wooden table

Vaporina assembled: two steel trays under the yellow “Skirt” lid, dancer handle on top

The “Skirt” lid resting on top of the tower

Background and goal

Alessi’s brief asked for ways to use less energy when cooking.

When water boils on the stove, most of its steam escapes and that heat is lost. Vaporina puts the steam to use: the water at the bottom of the pot cooks one dish, and the trays above it steam a second dish on the same burner. A second goal was that the stack should look good enough to serve from, so the food does not need to move to another dish.

Workbench with paper prototypes of the trays and modelling tools — Process · paper prototypes

Process

The trays, the lid and the handle were first made in paper.

After the paper prototypes, the design was modelled in 3D and rendered in a range of colours.

Renders in three colours

Product

One Vaporina fits several pot sizes and lifts out in one piece.

The wavy edge of the “Skirt” sits on pots of the standard diameters. The dancer-shaped handle on top lifts the trays and the lid out together.

Two hands lifting the “Skirt” lid off the tower

Two hands setting the “Skirt” lid onto the tower — Putting the “Skirt” on

The yellow-rimmed “Skirt” lid on its own

The parts laid out: two trays and the “Skirt” lid — Parts

Vaporina in an Alessi pot among steel cookware

Vaporina served on a dinner table — From pot to table

Eight-step illustrated user instructions, a page from the user book

User book on a red background — User book: Cucina al vapore con Vaporina

Majiroller with its two long steel handles

Background and goal

In the DRC, most water is still carried home by hand.

People carry it in buckets of 15 to 25 kg, often for half an hour or more over mud and sand, and children often do this work. These figures come from the research annex of the course project. The goal was a roller that lets two children share one load and that costs as little as possible to make.

Two children pulling a water roller across sand — Two children pulling a water roller

Process

The roller is made from three kinds of parts.

To keep the cost down, it uses a rotomoulded HDPE drum (a seamless plastic tank, the kind used for storing water), two recycled tyres and handles bent from steel tube. The fixings between these parts were worked out in 3D.

Exploded view of drum, tyres and handles — Parts: drum, tyres, two handles

Product

Two children pull the 50 kg of water instead of carrying it.

Each child pulls one handle, and the drum rolls between the two tyres over sand and stone. Reusing old tyres is the main idea of the design, because it keeps the cost low.

Handle straps wrapped around the drum between two tyres

Handles meeting the drum between two tyres

Art

Field

The image starts from layered noise that is bent and set in motion.

WebGL lets a web page draw with the graphics card, and a shader is a small program that works out the colour of every pixel. Field is built from four steps.

fBmLayers of random noise at different scales are added together (fractal Brownian motion).
Domain warpThe noise is used to distort its own coordinates, so the pattern folds into itself.
FlowThe pattern drifts in one direction and changes over time.
OKLCHThe values become colours through a lookup in OKLCH, a colour space in which equal steps look equally different to the eye.

Image

Texture effects are layered on top of the image.

Halftone screens, grain and colour bands are added at different scales. Depending on which ones are strong, the same motion can look like liquid, like print, or like a screen seen up close.

Interface

I also wrote the control interface.

Every parameter can be changed while the image runs. The program moves gradually from the old value to the new one, so the structure, colour and surface change smoothly instead of switching at once.

Changing parameters while the image runs

Object

The machine moves but produces nothing.

It does not cut, carry or make anything, and each turn of the top leaves everything exactly as it was.

Use

The machine can only be watched.

The frame is so fragile that touching it would upset its balance. The viewer cannot use it and has to keep a distance.

Position

The project looks at design without a function.

Design projects usually go from a problem to a result that solves it. This one drops the result and looks only at how a mechanism is put together and kept in balance. It follows Bruno Munari’s Macchine inutili (“useless machines”), hanging objects he began making in the 1930s to be looked at rather than used. The essay argues that an object without a task can make people slow down and look at it closely.

Art

Work made outside course briefs: spiral forms built with a wooden, motor-driven mechanism, and DJ sets, among them the sound design for a night event at Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan in 2025.

Two performers at a mixing desk before a projected visual — Fabbrica del VaporeSound design

Flashing lights

Live setDJing

DJ in headphones at three Pioneer decks, a red-lit screen behind — Live setDJing

Spiral object of fanned coloured sheets — Spiral forms · Model 1Kinetic object

Spiral of sheets on a table — Spiral forms · Model 2Kinetic object

Product

Art

Archive