Dan Mu
Programme:
Design - MPhil/PhD
Start date:
Sep-21
Mode of study:
Full time
Research title:
From Factory to Exhibition: The Role of Identity in Shaping Chinese Independent Product Designers
Research Output:
Edinburgh Research Explorer linkBiography
Dan Mu is a design researcher, educator and practitioner working across design culture, design anthropology, design history and material culture. Her research examines how design identities, cultural value and claims to originality are shaped through relationships among designers, markets and objects. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across China and Europe, her doctoral research traced the emergence of Chinese independent product designers and their negotiations of cultural identity, manufacturing and global markets. This research forms the basis of her monograph, Chinese Independent Product Designers: Tradition, Innovation and Cultural Identity in the Global Market, published by Bloomsbury Academic. Her current research extends these interests to craft economies, Shanzhai production, intellectual property and the politics of cultural recognition. At Edinburgh Futures Institute, Dan has taught service design and interdisciplinary project development to international postgraduate cohorts. Before entering academia, she worked as an industrial designer in China’s FMCG sector. She holds an MA in Expanded Practice, with Distinction, from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BEng in Furniture Design and Engineering from Beijing Forestry University.
Research interests
- Identity and Chinese independent design
- Shanzhai and copy cultures in design
- Relational creativity and distributed authorship in design
- Intellectual property regimes and creative labour in design
- Cultural policy and design governance
- Craft, heritage and regional cultural economies
- Design anthropology and multi-sited fieldwork
- Pluriversal and decolonial approaches to design
- AI and the reconfiguration of creativity
Dan’s teaching focuses on service design, design research, interdisciplinary collaboration and the relationship between design practice and its social and material contexts. At Edinburgh Futures Institute, she was a teaching assistant for Introduction to Service Design, Participatory Methods and Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Service Management and Design to international postgraduate cohorts from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds.
In 2025 and 2026, Dan was invited to the University of York as a Guest Lecturer, where she designed and delivered Whose Future? Culture, Technology and Speculative Design to undergraduate and postgraduate audiences. The lecture explored speculative design, pluriversal design, cosmotechnics and grassroots technological practices including Shanzhai.
Research
Research
Dan’s research interests include Chinese independent product design, Shanzhai manufacturing networks, craft economies, intellectual property and cultural policy. Her methods include ethnographic fieldwork across multiple sites, interviews, participant observation, digital ethnography and archival research. She is also interested in how design practice can make contested cultural and legal boundaries visible and open them to public discussion.
- Mu, D. Chinese Independent Product Designers: Tradition, Innovation and Cultural Identity in the Global Market. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781350583108.
- Mu, D. (2026) ‘Introduction’, in Mu, D et al. (eds.) Threads, Traces, and Artefacts: Revisiting Global Design History. London: Design History Society.
- Mu, D. and Sheng, P. (2026) Crafting Democracy: Leveraging Short Video Platforms to Empower Craftspeople and Foster Design-craft Collaboration. Craft Research Journal. DOI: 10.1386/crre_00168_1.
- Mu, D. (2025) Between distinction and common prosperity: how Chinese designers navigate Shanzhai and China’s intellectual property policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, pp. 1 to 21.
- Long, Q., Mu, D., Siu, K. W. M. and Peissel, J. R. (2023) Driving towards inclusion: Using a service design framework to investigate technology-induced inequalities. Strategic Design Research Journal, 16(1).
- Mu, D. (2024) Shanzhai as a Pluriversal Praxis: Challenging Western Design and Innovation Paradigm. DRS2024, Boston, USA.
- Mu, D. (2024) Unravelling identity’s influence on design: Chinese independent product designers’ narrative in design practice, manufacturing and exhibition. Cumulus Conference Proceedings Budapest 2024, pp. 2209 to 2217.