Honours student Stella Li finds inspiration in unexpected places
When honours student Stella Li was looking for inspiration for her Honours project, she turned to … mushrooms!
The result was Fungal Fusion, a three-stage project featuring mushrooms and mycelium – the root system of mushrooms and other fungi – that pushed the boundaries of visual communication.
“For the past year, I’ve been exploring how we might incorporate biomimicry into visual design,” says Stella, who is completing her UTS Bachelor of Design Honours majoring in visual communication.
“Biomimicry is simply a practice that looks to nature and how it functions to inspire design processes and symptoms.
“It has been used heaps in product design, fashion and architecture, but barely in visual design or visual communication.”
Applying biomimicry in design
The work, which Stella presented at the Design Honours Showcase, featured mycelium-inspired typography, a mushroom-derived grid system and structure, and a radial layout structure inspired by mycelium growth on different paper stocks.
Grid systems and layout structures are commonly used to place content in graphic design projects.
“I wanted to focus on the fundamentals of design,” Stella says.
“If it’s possible here, then it might be possible in other design contexts that fall within these categories.”
The results were striking: fonts and design techniques that draw inspiration from nature and a project that sat firmly at the intersection of science and design.
For Stella, the work was also a living example of how research can be applied to visual communication within the Honours degree.
“There’s a perception out there that you just have to be creative to go into visual communication, but it’s actually a degree that requires much more than just thinking about what’s pretty,” she says.
While she might have found her niche, it was only a few short years ago that Stella had no idea what she wanted to do after high school.
There’s a perception out there that you just have to be creative to go into visual communication, but it’s actually a degree that requires much more than just thinking about what’s pretty.
Practical experience
Towards the end of Year 12, she found herself drifting towards a commerce degree, “because it just felt like everyone else was doing that,” she says, but she didn’t feel particularly passionate about her future studies.
When her sister suggested that a visual communication course might help her tap into all the different things she enjoyed, something clicked. She started doing her research and found herself drawn to UTS because of the School of Design’s emphasis on practical skills development.
"You’re not just stuck in one area; you’re going to learn about all these other things," she says.
From day one, the degree lived up to her expectations, but it was in her third year that she saw her learning and design aspirations really start to take shape.
UTS has a lot of studios; you can explore a lot of different areas. Some people might think it’s just making posters or books, but the vis comm course also goes into web design, it goes into coding, it goes into motion.
That was the year of Socially Responsive Design, a subject in which students worked with real clients to develop design assets in response to the client’s brief.
Stella was part of a group that delivered the Say My Name campaign, which sought to decolonise the way that people talk about, pronounce and recognise names considered ‘foreign’ or difficult to pronounce in Anglo-Australian contexts.
In that same subject, she completed internships with a PR and social media agency; a sustainability consultancy; and an ag-tech company called Agriwebb where she worked on UI/UX projects.
“At the end of my internship, I was offered a role as a research design assistant to work with UTS, Agriwebb and several other universities and industry partners on a research project,” she says.
“That’s helped me connect with so many people in the tech industry, and I’ve also been able to work in several different fields like machine learning, agriculture and sustainability, so that’s been really interesting.”
Looking ahead
Now, as she reaches the end of her time at UTS, Stella is starting to think about her next steps. A career in branding calls — and while it might involve fewer mushrooms, it will almost certainly draw on the multitude of skills she developed during her degree.
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