Hi! My name is Ke Yue, I am a student study in Graphic and Media Design in LCC. This blog is mainly talk about my SIP, some ambitions of building my own brand. This term I start my first internship in Shanghai. I’m really glad to have the opportunities to work on projects for various brands. As the company focuses on digital visual interaction and spatial installation design, I'm able to get involved in areas that are different to my major and learn a lot about spatial design and visual expression. SIP is a project that requires me to squeeze in free time from a busy full-time internship, which is a huge challenge for someone with less than stellar time management skills. But I also knew that SIP is a chance to explore new areas and technologies, and that it would be useful for my fourth year and my future plans, thus I wanted to create a commercially viable and sustainable brand through my SIP. The field of mushrooms and fungi has actually interested me since a long time ago. I saw an exhibition called Mushrooms: The art, design and future of fungi at Somerset House in 2020 and I was very impressed by it. This exhibition brought the works of over 40 leading artists, designers and musicians, presented the role of mushrooms in art or the different roles of mushrooms in art, and finally explores the use of mushrooms and fungal mycelium materials in architecture, textiles and packaging. Each of the works is an interesting presentation and artistic expression of mushrooms. Mushrooms and fungi are a very large system of organisms, with over 14000 species of mushrooms having been discovered, and they are useful in many fields, including food, medicine, beauty and now, increasingly, new materials for mycelium. So creating a sustainable brand of mushroom is definitely a great choice. So after I started my DPS, I wanted to incorporate mushroom and fungal elements into my SIP. However, due to the time limit of the DPS, I decided to start with the diversity of mushrooms and design a product could be made easily and be productive. Since I love to draw illustrations, I decided to design a mushroom guide booklet or a calendar to showcase the diversity of mushrooms with lovely illustrations. After that I watched a number of documentaries on mushrooms including BBC's The Magic of Mushrooms (2018) and Fantastic Fungi (2019) and follow a number of professional mushroom bloggers, I really enjoyed reading their popular science on mushroom species and some very beautiful photographs posted on their channel, the diversity of mushrooms and the unique appearance and mechanisms of the different species is very appealing to me. And I started to try growing my own mushrooms at home, my first one was a brown oyster and I took some photos of it while it was growing, I wanted to try growing another variety and try to take stop-motion or time-lapse films in the next term, it was fun to watch the mushrooms grow and I think the mushrooms I grew tasted better. But in the course of my online research I also discovered that there is very little knowledge about poisonous mushrooms. I've asked my friends and family around me and half of them still has the idea that all colourful mushrooms are poisonous, which is completely wrong. In fact, most poisonous mushrooms look very common in colour and appearance, even the Amanita, which has a record of causing over 90% of deaths in the world, is basically pure white. Because of this phenomenon I thought it would be meaningful for me to tell people about the types and characteristics of poisonous mushrooms through my work. I have collected the types of poisonous mushrooms online and in books, and selected 12 typical and common mushrooms with different types of poisoning, including liver damage, psychotropic hallucinations, haemolytic and gastroenterological symptoms. Then I did some Marketing for illustration styles and printing products, just some simple drawings of mushrooms might not be very interesting and due to the prevalence of cartoon character mystery boxes among young people especially in China, I decided to design 12 cartoon characters based on 12 types of poisonous mushrooms. The characters are also sustainable designs for a brand because I can make dolls to sell after the DPS. I am also very curious about mycelium materials and I have a plan to explore sustainable mycelium materials for printing and 3D printing in the future.
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February 2023
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