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Zhang Chen
Canva
Head of Design of CJKI Region
Head of Design of CJKI Region at Canva, and a founding employee of Canva's China office. Previously, as the first designer at LinkedIn China, he single‑handedly built the core visual identity and the beloved IP character "Mengmeng" for the professional social product "Chitu," pioneering the localization of a global social platform for the Chinese market.
With over 10 years of experience in internet design and five years in design management, he possesses strong design thinking capabilities as well as an international perspective on team management. He excels at bridging the gap between internet product design, visual communication, user research, and data analytics, driving design decisions from "subjective aesthetics" to "data‑ and insight‑driven" approaches.
His core competency lies in helping foreign‑funded unicorn companies cross cultural divides and achieve 0‑to‑1 localization. He has successfully helped two international unicorns enter the Chinese market, building design teams from scratch, defining product language, adapting to local user habits, and ultimately achieving business breakthroughs. At Canva China, he leads the design team in continuously exploring the localized expression of the "design equity" philosophy, ensuring that AI‑powered creative tools truly serve ordinary Chinese users.
From "Action-Driven" to "Al Strategy-Driven":Canva Redefines Human-Machine Co-Creation
As AI transforms work rapidly, design and content practitioners face a key leap: evolving from task implementers to strategic partners. They need to deliver high-quality work, and connect content to business targets, user needs and growth paths, creating repeatable frameworks with quantifiable business value.
I split core competencies into five pillars for this transition:
1.Professional Skill——Grasp design standards, turn complex problems into collaborative, testable plans.
2.Business Insight——Collect and analyze data, understand metric drivers, align content choices with business results.
3.AI Enablement——Work alongside AI to raise efficiency, fill skill gaps, expand creative output, and maintain consistent, controllable quality.
4.Global Competency——Think cross-culturally and locally, build transferable frameworks, test and iterate across global markets.
5.Leadership——Align teams amid uncertainty, coordinate resources and collaboration, and drive teams to amplify outcomes.
AI brings the greatest leverage here. It does not replace professional skills, but optimizes repetitive work and lowers high-skill barriers, saving us from routine operations to focus on irreplaceable human work: judgment, prioritization, framework design and strategic planning.
In the end, design and content’s value lies not only in deliverables, but in supporting high-quality, efficient decision-making — helping organizations reinvent their roles and achieve breakthroughs in the AI age.
1、Ice‑Breaking & Paradigm Introduction
2、Immersive Experience: "Summoning" Design via Natural Language
3、From Tool to Ecosystem: Dissecting the Integrated System
4、Role‑Evolution Workshop
5、Vision Co‑Creation: Design Equity Cards
6、Summary & Q&A
1、Designers across interaction, visual, product, operation and other disciplines aiming to transition into AI‑driven design strategy
2、Product managers and AI project leads building AI‑powered productivity products
3、Design leaders planning team‑wide AI transformation
4、Creative practitioners, teachers and students interested in design‑content ecosystem
1、Master designers’ 5 core competencies for AI-era strategic growth
2、Learn full-link growth thinking via Canva’s global cases
3、Learn practical human-AI teamwork: break skill limits, seize opportunities and deliver projects.
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Canva AI 2.0
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Conversational Design
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Smart Object Editing
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HTML Import
