Henglong Dang

Multinational design & strategy studio that blends creativity & function to shape innovative experiences.

• Leads cross-functional operating design across strategy, product, and creative teams, translating long-range priorities into executable roadmaps with clear ownership and measurable milestones.
• Built governance rhythms for planning, risk review, and decision escalation that improved execution predictability and reduced coordination overhead across distributed collaborators.
• Drove structural reforms that increased team scalability, clarified accountability, and created a more resilient foundation for sustained organizational growth.

Providing a platform for interdisciplinary innovation through discussion, research, and real-world experimentation.

• Scaled Synaperge to 56 members across multiple countries, establishing a durable interdisciplinary community spanning AI, design, behavioral science, and social-impact innovation.
• Designed a project-based operating model that combines structured dialogue, research sprints, and prototype testing to move ideas from discussion to real-world experimentation.
• Mentored cross-functional teams through 3 innovation initiatives, including AI bias in ed-tech systems, fast-food branding psychology, and accessibility in personal finance UX.
• Built a leadership culture centered on intellectual rigor, ethical reflection, and practical execution so members can develop both analytical depth and implementation capability.

• Led a Human-Computer Interaction and fintech research program focused on reducing financial management friction, benchmarking feature fragmentation across 8 widely used consumer finance applications.
• Designed and executed a mixed-method study combining quantitative (N = 342 survey) and qualitative (N = 35 interviews) methods to map pain points in budgeting, bill tracking, savings coordination, and long-term planning workflows.
• Synthesized behavioral and interaction findings into a unified product architecture, then translated insights into a high-fidelity prototype for holistic household financial management.
• Paper accepted and presented at 27th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCII 2025).

• Authored a 257-page book introducing the "Great Outsourcing"—the systemic transfer of human judgment to generative systems through defaults, rankings, and automated recommendations.
• Maps concrete failure modes across education, healthcare, finance, and organizational governance, including decision atrophy, accountability diffusion, and over-trust in model outputs.
• Proposes a human-centered design framework with friction-aware interfaces, dissent checkpoints, and reflection prompts that keep critical thinking active in high-stakes workflows.
• Reframes innovation success around sustainability, social responsibility, and institutional resilience, arguing that efficiency without agency is a fragile and incomplete metric.

• Defines Relevance Gravity as an algorithmic attention force that promotes what is most legible and engaging, then traces how this distorts collective sense-making across education, media, and public discourse.
• Introduces a technical vocabulary—Epistemic Surface, Antididacticism, and Mythic Academicism—to explain why AI-era learning can appear comprehensive while actually reducing depth, struggle, and retention.
• Analyzes temporal and linguistic risks through Epistemic Latency and Semantic Drift, showing how static model knowledge can diverge from fast-moving social realities and fracture shared meaning.
• Argues that metric-first design can trigger Ethical Collapse by turning dignity, empathy, and wisdom into optimization targets, creating blind spots that feel efficient while eroding human responsibility.

• Advised district leaders on policies to expand student voices and qualitative measures. Contributed to policy discussions on human-centered systems.
• Helped shape long-term strategies balancing student needs with a $20M district budget deficit.

• Participated in AAAI seminars and actively engaged in research on AI ethics, model alignment, and HCI-AI intersections.