Sharon Zheng published by Daylon Hicks
Creative technology is one of the most fascinating subjects because the logic of engineering meets of art, and where what gets made is only as interesting as the person making it. It's a discipline that demands fluency in two languages at once: the precision of code and the feeling of design. But what separates a creative technologist from someone who simply does both is a point of view, a distinct understanding that runs through everything they touch.
Sharon Zheng is someone who's had that understanding showcased on full display. She’s a creative technologist building community and making art across digital and print worlds, She approaches her work the way a writer approaches a sentence, every element considered, nothing fabricated. She describes her GitHub as a visual diary, which tells you something right away. For her, her work isn't just a codebase, it’s a record of how she views creativity.
That eye for craft goes back further than her professional work. Her 2015 high school art thesis, "Six Times," was built around a remote-controlled car mounted in a geometric frame with markers attached, a piece designed entirely around human interaction, where the viewer became the controller and the trailing ink became a record of their choices. The story she was telling wasn't just visual, it was participatory.
She was drawing inspiration from creatives including Janet Saad-Cook, Orwell, and Murakami at the same time she was thinking about circuit boards, and even then the throughline was clear: technology as a way to ask bigger questions about time and what we leave behind. That's the kind of storytelling that stays with you, not because of how it looks, but because of how it makes you feel implicated in something larger than yourself. She co-founded Sunday Desert alongside Esther Cheung, a creative duo rooted in the belief that tech and art aren't separate pursuits but the same one approached from different angles. That collaborative instinct, the desire to build things that bring people together rather than just impress them is central to how she moves as a creative. She's also designed Tumblr themes used by over 75,000 users, a reminder that the most impactful storytelling doesn't always announce itself.
She's not chasing the new thing for the sake of it. She's asking what the work means, who it's for, and what it leaves in the room after the interaction ends. In a field that can easily get seduced by its own cleverness, that kind of craft-first storytelling is rare. And it's exactly what creative technology, at its best, is supposed to be.