ABOUT
Di Mao is a London-based multidisciplinary designer and researcher working across installation, exhibition, publication, brand identity, packaging, and spatial design. Holding a Distinction in MA Design from Goldsmiths, University of London, her practice investigates the relationships between bodies, tools, environments, and behaviour through research-led and participatory design.
Rather than treating design as a problem-solving discipline, her work approaches design as a method of observation, translation, and dialogue. Drawing from everyday gestures, material experimentation, and social systems, she develops installations, publications, and participatory experiences that reveal the often-overlooked rules shaping how people interact with the world around them.
Alongside her independent research, Di works across both commercial and cultural contexts, creating visual identities, exhibitions, publications, installations, and spatial experiences while collaborating with curators, artists, institutions, and brands on projects of different scales.
Her current practice continues to explore how design can create new forms of participation, encouraging people to reconsider the evolving relationships between bodies, environments, and the systems that connect them.
毛迪是一位常驻伦敦的跨学科设计师与研究者，实践涵盖装置、展览、出版、品牌识别、包装及空间设计。她以优异成绩毕业于伦敦大学金史密斯学院设计硕士专业，并通过研究驱动与参与式设计的方法，持续探索身体、工具、环境与行为之间的关系。
她并不将设计视为一种单纯解决问题的学科，而是将其作为观察、转译与建立对话的方法。从日常动作、材料实验与社会系统出发，她创作装置、出版物及参与式体验，揭示那些塑造人与周围世界互动方式、却常常被忽视的规则。
在持续进行独立研究的同时，毛迪也活跃于商业与文化领域，创作品牌视觉、展览、出版物、装置及空间体验，并与策展人、艺术家、文化机构及品牌合作，开展不同规模的项目。
她目前的实践持续探索设计如何创造新的参与方式，引导人们重新思考身体、环境，以及连接两者的各种系统之间不断演变的关系。
Di Mao is a London-based multidisciplinary designer and researcher working across installation, exhibition, publication, brand identity, packaging, and spatial design. Holding a Distinction in MA Design from Goldsmiths, University of London, her practice investigates the relationships between bodies, tools, environments, and behaviour through research-led and participatory design.
Rather than treating design as a problem-solving discipline, her work approaches design as a method of observation, translation, and dialogue. Drawing from everyday gestures, material experimentation, and social systems, she develops installations, publications, and participatory experiences that reveal the often-overlooked rules shaping how people interact with the world around them.
Alongside her independent research, Di works across both commercial and cultural contexts, creating visual identities, exhibitions, publications, installations, and spatial experiences while collaborating with curators, artists, institutions, and brands on projects of different scales.
Her current practice continues to explore how design can create new forms of participation, encouraging people to reconsider the evolving relationships between bodies, environments, and the systems that connect them.
毛迪是一位常驻伦敦的跨学科设计师与研究者，实践涵盖装置、展览、出版、品牌识别、包装及空间设计。她以优异成绩毕业于伦敦大学金史密斯学院设计硕士专业，并通过研究驱动与参与式设计的方法，持续探索身体、工具、环境与行为之间的关系。
她并不将设计视为一种单纯解决问题的学科，而是将其作为观察、转译与建立对话的方法。从日常动作、材料实验与社会系统出发，她创作装置、出版物及参与式体验，揭示那些塑造人与周围世界互动方式、却常常被忽视的规则。
在持续进行独立研究的同时，毛迪也活跃于商业与文化领域，创作品牌视觉、展览、出版物、装置及空间体验，并与策展人、艺术家、文化机构及品牌合作，开展不同规模的项目。
她目前的实践持续探索设计如何创造新的参与方式，引导人们重新思考身体、环境，以及连接两者的各种系统之间不断演变的关系。
Selected Projects
Speculative Design + Book Design + Object Making|Editorial design
2025
How a Garden Becomes a Dialogue is a participatory design project that explores the relationship between people and nature through gardening. Transforming bodily gestures into gardening tools, it invites participants to engage with planting as a physical dialogue between the body, tools, and the environment. Rather than seeing the garden as a natural space, the project reveals it as a system shaped by actions, decisions, and negotiation, where tools subtly influence both human behaviour and ecological relationships.
2026 London Design Festival（Isola Design Festival x Shoreditch Design Week），London，UK
2026 Dutch Design Week（kazerne designlab）, Eindhoven, Dutch
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Art Direction + Book Design + Designer
2025
Time to Clean is a participatory design project that reconsiders cleaning as a cultural and social practice. Through five interactive tools, it explores the relationship between bodily movement, labour, social interaction, and space, transforming routine cleaning into shared experiences. Rather than offering solutions, the project invites participants to reflect on how cleaning shapes everyday behaviour, relationships, and the often overlooked systems that organise daily life.
2026 Photofairs Shanghai,China
2026 X Contemporary Art , Hunan, China
2025 GDC Young Award--Merit Award
2025 Platinum Originality--Honorable mention awards
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Art Direction + Book Design + Designer
2025
The Year With Many Summers is an interactive installation that reimagines how we perceive summer. Using real-time temperature data instead of the calendar, it triggers the familiar sound of an ice cream van when specific temperature thresholds are reached. By questioning whether unusually warm days outside the traditional season can also be considered summer, the project challenges fixed seasonal boundaries and proposes a more fluid understanding shaped by climate, environment, and lived experience.
2026 Photofairs Shanghai,China
2026 X Contemporary Art , Hunan, China
2025 LICC Award--Short List
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Art Direction + Set Designer
2023-2024
From interpreting seasonal brand briefs to delivering
final visual assets, I work across visual development,
art direction, and production coordination to ensure
consistency between concept, space, movement, and
final image output.
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Brand Visual Identity + Packaging Design + Website Design
2026
YANWU is a tea brand rooted in six generations of family-owned tea cultivation in Chaozhou, China. As the brand prepared to enter the UK market, the project developed a complete visual identity and digital experience that translates this long-standing relationship with tea into a contemporary brand language.
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Art Direction + Visual Design + Exhibitor
2025
This project developed the visual identity and communication system for the Goldsmiths, University of London MA Design: Expanded Practice Degree Show. As part of the creative direction team, I contributed to defining the exhibition concept and led the development of its visual language. The final identity was applied across the catalogue, website, social media, exhibition handbook, and on-site graphics, creating a cohesive system that reflected the exhibition’s themes across both digital and physical platforms.
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Graphic Design
2026
7-Day Wonder is a visual identity and exhibition design project developed for a group exhibition. Responding to the participating artists’ practices, the design draws from their use of materials, structures, and modes of viewing to create a cohesive visual language. Applied across posters, catalogues, postcards, tickets, and exhibition graphics, the project also includes production coordination, material selection, and print management to ensure consistency between the exhibition’s concept and its physical execution.
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Brand Visual Identity
2025
WHOO is a restaurant brand inspired by the shared food culture of Hunan and Hubei. Its name references both the character Hu (“lake”) and the Chinese idiom Wuhu Sihai, symbolising people from different places gathering together. Inspired by the warmth of everyday street dining, the visual identity draws from the iconic red plastic stool, using bold typography, vibrant colours, and playful graphics to create a contemporary brand rooted in familiarity, hospitality, and local culture.
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Branding
2022
SHUSHU is a conceptual home fragrance brand inspired by the scent and texture of trees. The project explores how branding can transform everyday fragrance into a ritual that reconnects people with nature.
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Book Design + Editorial Design
2024
Memories in the Evening is an editorial project exploring memory, objects, and family history. Through five everyday belongings preserved by my grandmother, the publication reconstructs her life story while reflecting the experiences of ordinary women in 1980s China. Combining photography, interviews, and editorial design, the project reveals how overlooked objects become vessels of emotion, cultural memory, and intergenerational connection.
2025 Hiiibrand Award-- Short list
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Research & Practice
Reading Room #2 explores typology books as a way to turn quiet obsessions into shared investigations, with guest visual designer Di Mao.
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