Last year I decided to take a veru interesting online shourt course called Diseño feminista decolonial in a page called Tallerista, which was taught by Beatriz Leal, a chilean feminist designer. Her course was amazing and I learned a lot from it, so I decided to send her an email. She was very kind to answer me back and we had a ver interesting conversation.

After my talk with Beatriz Leal, there are some important considerations to have in mind before starting my research project. It’s importan to clarify that these are my one notes on our conversation:

• “Design” as we know it has always been a tool of capitalism, and we should accept it as such. It has always been intrinsically part of the system since its beginnings. It’s the standardization of processes. What Design Thinking did was take the personal process every designer was having and labeled it into steps. In Design School, they don’t teach design thinking; they teach to understand the world and develop taste and a style according to each point of view. Nevertheless, Design Thinking allowed different disciplines to dialogue and to share common points in different practices.
• While embracing a feminist project, it is important to understand that feminism is not the focus of the project; it is just a way of understanding the world. It’s all about designing with the feminist point of view.
• Not everyone knows what design is. Design is a highly classist and elitist discipline, so people don’t think about the design different objects have. Design is a given practice to almost everyone. Some people don’t have the language to talk about it.
• Don’t generalize your privilege and make it a necessity.
• Feminism makes us aware of the process. It asks you to be aware of your positionality. It’s about being honest with who you are. Working with feminism also implies that there are going to be contradictions, and that’s okay; it’s part of the process.
• Feminism makes us question all the time and rethink our given “solutions”. There’s an inherent relation of power between the object of study and who studies it, and that is also okay. It’s important to be aware of it.
• There is a difference between what it means to decolonize in the first world and actually making something decolonial.
• There’s a need to define every concept so we don’t take for granted different appreciations that might interfere with what we mean.