Teng Yishu

Associate Professor, PhD Supervisor

Research Areas: Design Education / Social Design / Cultural Policy

Teng Yishu is an Associate Professor at Beijing Normal University. She received her PhD from the School of Arts and Media, Beijing Normal University, and completed postdoctoral research at the School of Chinese Language and Literature at the same institution. She is a council member of the Aesthetic Education Research Committee of the Beijing Higher Education Association and serves as an evaluation expert for the Degree Evaluation Center of the Ministry of Education.

Her research is grounded in the epistemological and problem-oriented foundations of design studies, with a focus on design as a complex system of cultural practice, knowledge production, and social innovation. Taking social design as a core analytical lens, her work examines the methodological value and mediating role of design across educational systems, cultural institutions, and processes of social transformation.

In the field of design education, she investigates the cognitive structures, knowledge genealogies, and capability-formation mechanisms underlying design learning, with particular attention to how design thinking and creativity are translated through educational processes to address public issues and societal needs.

Her research on cultural policy explores the interaction between design and institutional frameworks, analyzing how policy environments shape design practices and influence their social functions and communicative pathways.

From an interdisciplinary perspective integrating design and communication, her work further examines how design is embedded within national cultural strategies, the creative economy, and social innovation systems. She emphasizes the connective, translational, and mediating roles of design in cultural construction and social change, aiming to provide theoretical foundations for public-value-oriented design education and cultural governance.