Michelle Fehler
Climate designer and educator focusing on leveraging nature's strategies to teach a life-centered design thinking process
I am a Biomimicry Professional and a Visual Communication Designer who is passionate about connecting Nature’s strategies to design. My research focuses on defining and creating tools for a life-centered design thinking methodology that allows the infusion of biomimicry thinking into the traditional human-centered design process. I am a professor teaching various multi-disciplinary design studios at The Design School at ASU and also teach the capstone course for the online MS in BMY program. I have presented my work at various conferences including World Usability day, AIGA Y-conference, AIGA PHXDW, SustainbleUX, Audubon society, and Target HQ. My work has been published in the Cooper Hewitt’s Summer 2019 Design Journal among other peer reviewed journals.
Projects
Okala Practitioner's book
The Okala Practitioner's book is a guide for designers to learn how to engage in ecological design. The authors hired me to redesign the layout of the content for their second edition, and then again for the cover redesign for their third edition.
Book is printed with non-toxic ink on chlorine-free 100% post consumer waste (PCW) paper.
Case study »
“How would nature design a notebook for designers?”
In my classes, I introduce students to the Life’s Principles (LPs) (cc Biomimicry 3.8) to help them arrive at life-centered and nature-friendly solutions. For example, Zhenqui Wang (MVCD Class of 2017) designed a projects that follows 11 of the 26 Life’s Principles by asking the question, “How would nature design a notebook for designers?”. This notebook features a diverse set of page designs that allow for either writing or sketching, a built-in ruler, an ever-changing cover design, as well as an unlimited expansion of pages due to the no-glue binding aside from other nature-friendly elements.