Michelle Fehler
Michelle is a visual communicator who became conflicted about the wasteful behavior that is associated with graphic design. Believing that there is a better way to help businesses be heard and seen, she decided to pursue a Master's in Interaction Design with a focus on Biomimetic Graphic Design. Currently, she is part of the faculty at the Design School at ASU teaching Visual Communication as well as Biomimicry. She recently started working on her second Master’s through the newly established Biomimicry Program at ASU in collaboration with B3.8 as well as has been accepted into the BPro cohort, which is a globally-renowned two-year program led by Biomimicry 3.8 co-founder, Dr. Dayna Baumeister and social innovation expert Toby Herzlich.
Her research focuses on defining a life-centered design thinking methodology that allows the infusion of biomimicry thinking into the traditional design thinking process. In her work, Michelle is applying biomimetic thinking to visual communication strategies that include magazines, design layout, book design, non-profit campaigns, educational tools etc. Aside from work, she loves to tend to her vegetable garden, practice meditation and yoga, as well as enjoy culinary plant-based adventures. Everyday she learns new ways on how to align her passion for nature with her life to reduce any negative consequences on the planet, and to protect all life.
Supervisors: Dayna Baumeister, Prasad Boradkar, Alfred C. Sanft, and Mookesh Patel
Her research focuses on defining a life-centered design thinking methodology that allows the infusion of biomimicry thinking into the traditional design thinking process. In her work, Michelle is applying biomimetic thinking to visual communication strategies that include magazines, design layout, book design, non-profit campaigns, educational tools etc. Aside from work, she loves to tend to her vegetable garden, practice meditation and yoga, as well as enjoy culinary plant-based adventures. Everyday she learns new ways on how to align her passion for nature with her life to reduce any negative consequences on the planet, and to protect all life.
Supervisors: Dayna Baumeister, Prasad Boradkar, Alfred C. Sanft, and Mookesh Patel
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Papers by Michelle Fehler
Design is taught through a linear approach, with project prompts that historically focused on the intended visual outcome leaving little room to investigate the root causes of an issue. Over the past two decades, DT has emerged from research done at Stanford Universityʼs Hasso Plattner Institute of Design to “...tackle societyʼs most intractable problems” (McCarthy, 2022, p.40). It adapted the design process (largely known only to design disciplines) into a formulaic step-by-step human-centered solution-focused method that any profession can understand and implement to address simplistic to systemic problems.
However, as DT hopes to be more successful in solving systemic global issues, it still is a comparatively reductive toolkit that most oen fails to meet the complex challenges at hand. It is unable to gaze beyond our anthropogenic perspective where “…the prevailing theories of design thinking in organizations remain entrenched in the making or technē paradigm. Ironically, this serves to maintain the status quo and stifle progress” (Lee, 2021, p. 497). Instead, a more holistic approach to adapting to our cultural shis and growing climate crisis is to engage in LCST. LCST, as the authors see it, differentiates itself as a practice and mindset that is framework agnostic, discipline inclusive, nature-inspired, life-centered (not exclusively human-centered), and intersectional in its approach to problem framing. Like Systems Thinking (ST), it gives “...designers a powerful tool for circumnavigating the problems of the age. Focus on relationships over parts; recognize that systems exhibit self-organization and emergent behaviors; analyze the dynamic nature of systems to understand and influence the complex societal, technological, and economic ecosystem in which you and your organization operate” (Vassallo, 2017). LCST is a fluid practice that does seek solutions but is problem-focused.
It is also a mindset; a way of seeing the big picture and the details simultaneously by visualizing connections, causes and effects, and relationships between people, the planet, and their actions. In other words, LCST shows how everything is connected and that our natural systems depend on a dynamic non-equilibrium trying to achieve balance. Indigenous biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer (2015) builds upon this definition more poetically; “The breath of plants gives life to animals and the breath of animals gives life to plants. My breath is your breath, your breath is mine. Itʼs the great poem of give and take, of reciprocity that animates the world” (p. 344).
Design is taught through a linear approach, with project prompts that historically focused on the intended visual outcome leaving little room to investigate the root causes of an issue. Over the past two decades, DT has emerged from research done at Stanford Universityʼs Hasso Plattner Institute of Design to “...tackle societyʼs most intractable problems” (McCarthy, 2022, p.40). It adapted the design process (largely known only to design disciplines) into a formulaic step-by-step human-centered solution-focused method that any profession can understand and implement to address simplistic to systemic problems.
However, as DT hopes to be more successful in solving systemic global issues, it still is a comparatively reductive toolkit that most oen fails to meet the complex challenges at hand. It is unable to gaze beyond our anthropogenic perspective where “…the prevailing theories of design thinking in organizations remain entrenched in the making or technē paradigm. Ironically, this serves to maintain the status quo and stifle progress” (Lee, 2021, p. 497). Instead, a more holistic approach to adapting to our cultural shis and growing climate crisis is to engage in LCST. LCST, as the authors see it, differentiates itself as a practice and mindset that is framework agnostic, discipline inclusive, nature-inspired, life-centered (not exclusively human-centered), and intersectional in its approach to problem framing. Like Systems Thinking (ST), it gives “...designers a powerful tool for circumnavigating the problems of the age. Focus on relationships over parts; recognize that systems exhibit self-organization and emergent behaviors; analyze the dynamic nature of systems to understand and influence the complex societal, technological, and economic ecosystem in which you and your organization operate” (Vassallo, 2017). LCST is a fluid practice that does seek solutions but is problem-focused.
It is also a mindset; a way of seeing the big picture and the details simultaneously by visualizing connections, causes and effects, and relationships between people, the planet, and their actions. In other words, LCST shows how everything is connected and that our natural systems depend on a dynamic non-equilibrium trying to achieve balance. Indigenous biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer (2015) builds upon this definition more poetically; “The breath of plants gives life to animals and the breath of animals gives life to plants. My breath is your breath, your breath is mine. Itʼs the great poem of give and take, of reciprocity that animates the world” (p. 344).