After taking time to think carefully and prepare the presentation for the assessment, I realized I still needed more feedback from external advisors. So, I took on the task of reaching out to even more people.

I have a spreadsheet where I have a track of anyone who I have ever contacted. Here’s the link.

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The idea I have so far is to create a board game as a tool to spark conversations about behaviors we’ve made invisible. This was my major insight: How do we identify what we don’t know? How do we imagine something that doesn’t exist in front of us? Very complicated, right?

So, I already have a list of people whose opinions I want to hear. I’ve sent out many emails, and I’ve had a conversation with Sofía Díaz.

She is a great university friendwho has dedicated her professional career to working on gender-related issues, specially from the sustainability focus. I reached out to her because I’ve always respected her opinion, and I know she has experience working with communities in Colombia, always with a gender focus. Right now she’s working with a charity that do workshops on gender and sustainability in rural areas of Colombia.

During our conversation, I shared my creative process, and I think what stood out most to her was the perspective on the design of objects as a reproduction of the oppressive system. I tried steering the conversation back to gender norms, but she kept circling back, genuinely surprised by something she had never considered before.

Here are some key points from her comments, which also reflect much of what I think about my project:

• Objects evolve with the populations, and we all interact with them in different ways.
• There’s a clear difficulty in inventing something new, but above all, what are objects really?
• How masculinized are our thoughts?
• The feminine struggle lies in the fact that we’ve never truly known what our bodies need. It’s hard to recognize those needs and fight for them because we were never taught.
• She asked me, What happens after the game? The encounter alone is already positive, but how can we turn this into something bigger?
• What do we do with so much frustration?
• What can we do together? The sense of togetherness makes us feel like we can handle anything. We need to awaken that emotion. En manada
• What we can’t see, we can’t change, but we’ve never liked inhabiting rage and frustration.
• Going out into the streets with a group of women responds to impact and change—transforming the gaze.
• But definitely, I would make the target group even smaller because each population has a different relationship with objects.
• Thinking about carrying a little red flag all our lives—this is the fight to recognize what we deserve.
• There’s no dialogue with our bodies, and we are afraid to talk about what we feel and what happens to them.

At the end she was very happy to be part of the conversaion but was not sure on how much she could add to what I’ve done.

I have a feeling that most of the times when I reach out to experts it becomes a little bit like a tutorial and it’s hard for me to cut that habit.

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.