Marysol Ortega Pallanez

Marysol Ortega Pallanez
PhD in Transition Design
- Pedagogical and care-based design practices
- The politics of textile-making
- The role of narrative and embodiment in addressing systemic challenges
- Future-making through pluriversal design.
Dissertation title:
Becoming Resonant in Design: An inquiry into public space exclusion in Hermosillo, Mexico through women-plant relations
Advisory Committee: Jonathan Chapman, PhD, Carnegie Mellon University (primary), and Tania Pérez-Bustos, PhD, Universidad Nacional de Colombia
External Examiner: Andrea Botero Cabrera, PhD, Aalto University
Dissertation Abstract:
The latest developments in design theory especially in the areas of Participatory Design, Transition Design, Design for Social Innovation, and Pluriversal Designs call for designing that is localized, relational, and takes the sustainment and healing of the web of life as a matter of care. Yet, current expressions of design theory in practice expose missing threads between concepts and lived experience, particularly in nuanced understandings of ways-of-being as designers entangled in socioecological work. Situated in the desert city of Hermosillo, Mexico, this practice-based inquiry aims at weaving new threads between design practice and theory to cultivate attunement for specificities in our designing. As a result, I call for a new way-of-being as a designer, one that cultivates design sensibilities that attune and correspond with forms of worldmaking like the ones found in Hermosillo. For this new way-of-being as a designer, I propose a design philosophy I characterize as resonant, as it involves a back-and-forth between intentionality and attentionality from the designer. Thus, the resonant design philosophy’s positions the design endeavor in a paradigm of caring for relations through designing for conditions of creative autonomy. As part of it, this resonant design philosophy invites designers to engage in caring for our designing.