Helen Chen’s thesis, Fruiting Bodies: Fungal Futures for Collaborative Survival, explores how new material ecologies and interspecies consciousness—the acknowledgment that we live in complex ecosystems involving both human and non-human life—can create a paradigm shift in current industrial modes of production and consumption. In order to address the urgency of landfill and chemical waste streams around the world, she began her thesis exploration with prototyping biomaterials ranging from bacterial cellulose to algae-based bioplastics and mycelium.