As the 2025 global design award season nears its end, one of its biggest creative stories is still quietly unfolding — the “grand slam” sweep by Tianyi Zhang. Zhang, a Seattle-based UI/UX designer, has achieved a feat virtually unheard of in the industry: winning top honors across five major international competitions in a single cycle. In the span of a few months, her sustainability-focused project EcoEat earned a Red Dot Design Award, dual Indigo Design Awards, a MUSE Design Award, a GDUSA Digital Design Award, and a New York Product Design Award. Individually, each award is prestigious; together, they mark a clean sweep that has left many in the design world astonished. For one designer to impress juries across all these competitions – Indigo alone attracts thousands of submissions from more than 50 countries – underscores how extraordinary Zhang’s accomplishment is.
This moment is a humble triumph for Zhang, who until now has been quietly and steadily making her mark. Rather than chasing accolades, she focused on tackling an everyday problem through design – and the accolades found her. EcoEat, the platform at the heart of her awards streak, reimagines how we deal with food waste. “Born from the urgent reality that 30–40% of food in the U.S. is wasted every year, EcoEat reimagines surplus food as an opportunity rather than a problem,” notes the team’s project brief. In other words, EcoEat transforms the act of saving leftovers into an engaging, impactful experience. By combining cutting-edge AI with intuitive interfaces, the platform enables businesses and individuals to sell, donate, or find surplus food effortlessly, all while reducing carbon emissions and supporting a circular economy. “At EcoEat, our mission is simple: make sustainability accessible to everyone,” the design team says, framing food waste not as a niche issue but as a daily challenge that design can help solve
How EcoEat works is key to understanding its broad appeal. The user experience is built to be as simple as snapping a photo. EcoEat uses AI image recognition so users can post surplus food just by taking a picture; the app auto-fills details, estimates the item’s shelf life, and even suggests whether to sell or donate, cutting out friction and guesswork. Users can then see tangible feedback: the platform visualizes how much CO₂ emission they’ve averted and how many meals they’ve helped create, even offering recipe tips to repurpose leftovers. On the business side, EcoEat provides a tablet-based dashboard for restaurants or grocers to list excess inventory in bulk, get AI-driven redistribution suggestions, and track their collective impact. “For businesses, we wanted EcoEat to be more than a tool. It had to be practical, scalable, and easy for teams to adopt,” explains Yitian Zeng, a senior product designer on the project, who led the tablet (B2B) experience. In short, the platform was designed to slot smoothly into daily routines—be it a home cook sharing extra portions or a café managing end-of-day surplus—without adding complexity.
To keep sustainability engaging, EcoEat leans on thoughtfully crafted interaction design. The app features a gamified environmental tracking system that turns climate action into a rewarding game. Each time users save food, EcoEat shows them the weight of emissions they’ve prevented, visualized in friendly, motivating graphics. “The gamification system goes beyond playful animations; it’s designed to make sustainable choices feel intuitive and genuinely rewarding,” says Tianyi Zhang, who led the mobile experience design and crafted the motion graphics for these features. In practice, this means that everyday actions, like rescuing a loaf of bread or donating surplus produce, trigger satisfying visual feedback and “green energy” rewards, encouraging people to build lasting habits. It’s a gentle form of persuasion, marrying behavioral science with a bit of joy. The design even extends to the visual identity: EcoEat’s interface uses a vibrant red as its core color to signify energy and action. “We wanted users to feel energetic and joyful while using EcoEat, and we chose red as the theme color because it naturally encourages appetite,” adds Shinga Yoshimine, the project’s creative director. Every detail, from color palette to animated avatar, works in concert to turn what might have been a mundane chore into an engaging experience.
It’s easy to see why international juries took notice. When EcoEat entered the Red Dot Award: Design Concept in 2025, it stood out for its human-centered approach and blend of tech and design. The Red Dot jury praised EcoEat as “a compelling example of how design can drive positive change, turning what might feel like a chore into a smooth and joyful experience… removing friction from sustainable action and empowering users to make a real impact”. That sentiment was echoed across other competitions. At the Indigo Design Awards in April, EcoEat won Gold in the Apps for Social Change category and Silver in Apps (Digital Design), a double honor that highlighted both its social impact and its excellence in user experience. Indigo’s panel, known to prize originality and emotional impact, clearly saw plenty of both in EcoEat. A month earlier, in March, the project had clinched a Silver MUSE Design Award in the conceptual design category, affirming the strength of its core concept and strategy. By May, EcoEat was garnering recognition on American shores too – it was named a winner in GDUSA’s 2025 Digital Design Awards, and also took a Silver award in Interface & User Experience at the New York Product Design Awards. The consistency of acclaim – five juried competitions, five wins – speaks to something special. Few projects resonate so widely with different panels, but EcoEat’s blend of usability, innovation, and purpose struck a chord everywhere. In the typically siloed world of design awards, Zhang had effectively bridged the gap between categories and disciplines, uniting them with a single clear vision of positive change.
For Tianyi Zhang, this convergence of accolades is deeply meaningful because it validates the ethos that guides her work. A trained animator-turned-designer, Zhang’s journey has always straddled the line between creativity and impact. She discovered her passion for UI/UX during the pandemic, realizing the potential of design to drive real-world change. After studying Interactive Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design and refining her craft on projects like Google Maps, she found herself drawn to problems of sustainability and community, the everyday systems that quietly shape our lives. EcoEat grew out of that mindset. It wasn’t about flashy tech for its own sake, but about designing a solution for an everyday behavior (throwing away food) and flipping it into something positive. “Food waste is often overlooked in the climate conversation, yet its environmental cost is massive. We set out to create a platform that’s not only impactful and rewarding to use, but also regenerative, helping people build habits that give back more than they take,” the EcoEat team reflects. Those words could double as a description of Zhang’s design philosophy. In her work, we see an emphasis on circular design, creating loops of reuse and regeneration, and on what she calls a “quiet impact.” Rather than forcing change through guilt or shock, EcoEat gently coaxes users toward more sustainable behavior, making the experience feel empowering instead of burdensome.
Now, with an armful of trophies and international headlines, Zhang finds herself in an unusual position: the spotlight. True to form, she remains thoughtful and humble about it. Winning five major awards in one season is “unbelievable,” she admits, but mainly in how it shines a light on the cause behind the work. “Honestly, I’m grateful for the recognition, but the real reward is seeing people get inspired to waste less and care more in their daily lives,” Zhang says, reflecting on EcoEat’s journey. “Design isn’t about making grand gestures for applause; it’s about those small, consistent changes we can encourage – the quiet things that end up making a big difference.” It’s a perspective that resonates in an industry often chasing the next big thing. As the 2025 award season draws to a close, Zhang’s quiet grand slam stands as a powerful reminder that design excellence and social good can go hand in hand. Her success, achieved not with bombast but with clarity of purpose, underscores a shift in global design priorities: innovation with empathy, beauty with impact. And in the end, it underlines what Tianyi Zhang’s career is steadily proving, that sometimes the most remarkable design stories grow from solving everyday problems, nurtured by patience, purpose, and a belief that even small actions can echo loudly in the world.