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IT IS HAPPENING AROUND US Zine By students of the Environmental Justice Changemakers Spring 2025 / Von Steuben High School / Chicago Public Schools.

In a society where young people have limited «power» and often feel incapable of doing great things, we find clarity in the mist, a place that allows us to experiment, raise our voices, and dedicate our time and hearts to great things and opportunities. In the ASM environment justice program, we find ourselves and have decided to create this «magazine» to express our ideas and solutions to problems in our community. Many times, small and continuous changes lead to big results. So we ask the reader to put their heart into these pages and seek inspiration in making small but big changes in their community.

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ADVOCACY Radio Show, youth for environmental justice in Chicago / Summer 2024 / Peterson Elementary School / Chicago Public Schools

Throughout the Summer, I worked with the Carole Robertson Center for Learning and After School Matters to develop the Environmental Justice Changemakers program. During six weeks and 160 hours, we developed a participatory process to open a conversation about enviromental justice inequity in the city of Chicago. Students 14 to 16 years old and from different High Schools from across the city expressed their experiences with the struggles their neighborhoods face, including contaminated water, soil, and air. As a result of the collaborative process, which used methods including storymaps, visual dialogues and participatory design, students developed the ADVOCACY Radio Show: Youth for environmental justice in Chicago . They developed this program with the intention of bringing awarness to their communities and to amplify their voices to improve the policies and services that serve citizens inteads of big companies and corporations. They spoke from their experience and in their own words. They presented a live radio broadcast on WZRD Chicago 88.3 FM the student and community led radio station located at Northeastern Illinois University NEIU. You can listen to the radio show by following this link and join the environmental justice conversation led by our youth.

Listen the ADVOCACY Radio Show, youth for environmental justice in Chicago.

Design Studies Program Adjunct Assistant Professor. University of Illinois at Chicago School of Design 

Creating and facilitating the Design studio class about Participatory Design and Co-design: Perspectives from the Global South

I am excited by sharing the Popular Education (Freire 1979 ) approach as part of a participatory design course. Students from the BA in design program at the UIC School of Design reflected on how they perceive themselves in their communities, bringing their stories, experiences, and cultural backgrounds into the design process. They created a common language to discuss social isolation, identified as an essential topic for the collaborative approach. We applied tools from the Design of the Oppressed Network that allowed us to discuss our role as designers in our culture and how we reinforce and promote social changes.
Students developed an iterative co-design process to build on their collective experiences. One of the results is the Creative Conversation tool: a collaborative card game with the objective of reshaping the design school landscape. During the last month, students, staff, and faculty from the UIC School of Design participated in the game implementation, generating an open conversation among participants, who reflected on their community and imagined positive tactics to strengthen it. We finished our participatory process, including implementation feedback with a final version of this open-source tool.

Adjunct Assistant Professor for the Graduate Studies program en University of Illinois Chicago, College of Architecture, Design and Art

• Creating and facilitating the graduation seminar Participatory Design and Co-design: Perspectives from the Global South

My experience facilitating the graduate course Participatory Design and Co-design: Perspectives from the Global South, has been a fantastic opportunity to learn from new participants and share my previous collaborative work with indigenous communities in Mexico and Ecuador. We have implemented a participatory approach in design processes with a great group of graphic and industrial designers from the UIC School of Design. We applied insights from popular education and action research that bring to light essential issues experienced by the student community. Then participants co-designed visual tools that promote awareness of these topics to amplify a social conversation within the School of Design community. Ultimately, implementing the participatory interventions aims to imagine future possibilities and design collective actions.  #design #education #community

To learn about participant’s processes, you can follow the links:

Food Routine action research group

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_fhMKjf7DWE6l_a0spnObeUBdj5Vvxtv

Commute to UIC action research group

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RFOJRTbNhujS_ru3-KaJyyd2Z-Uvy7d_

Seminar description

Explore and learn methods of participatory design (PD) and co-design which follow the popular education (PE) approach developed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. These collaborative methods incorporate an egalitarian dialogue between participants and facilitator; both are considered critical thinkers who are recognized in their capacity to make, create and transform through a praxis (action/reflection) model. In this way, students will experience and learn how to integrate PD with their professional practice, which will promote empowerment in the social sphere by including all people involved in their process.

We will explore methods including game design, sensory cartography and community mappings among other visual tools, to support a co-design process that incorporates expressive media. We will identify PE concepts fundamental to its methodology such as the generative theme, which according to Freire ¨is characterized by a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values and challenges in dialectical interaction with their opposites striving towards their fulfillment¨. The concrete representation of these generative themes are linked with participants’ interest in finding a common praxis. Discussions will be held with an emphasis on authors and design projects from Latin America to help us interpret and understand decolonizing perspectives of the PD practices that will integrate knowledge and practices from the Global South.

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Assistant Professor of Visual Communication, Branding and Editorial design 01/01/2018 – 02/29/2020
San Francisco de Quito University, School of Communication and Contemporary Arts, Quito, Ecuador
First liberal-arts institution in the Andean region with 9,000+ students and 300 full-time faculty

• Instructed 80+ introductory-level students in implementing graphic design thinking and participatory design methods in education
• Developed tools such as interviews, focus groups, visual brainstorming, mind mapping, visual research, empathy maps, FODA analysis and business models to promote research and develop projects applicable for solving practical problems
• Prepared classes following the curricula for multiple subjects including: Visual communication, branding, editorial design, and graphic production

Students portfolio: School of Communication and Contemporary Arts, San Francisco de Quito University, Quito, Ecuador

Muuch design la is a program with 5 staff members focused on organizing and facilitating creative processes by learning with games designed with communities to preserve traditional knowledge. It has been implemented in the Yucatan peninsula, México as well as the Andeas and Amazon region, Ecuador.

Please follow us at Muuch design lab https://jugandomuuch.com/

Vision | To revitalize the traditional life skills of indigenous communities for cultural resilience, environmental conservation, and to address local needs.

Mission Statement | To promote intergenerational dialogue through ethnographic research and participatory design workshops that can be replicated by an indigenous community to register and transmit their traditional life skills.

• Implemented a one-year pilot project with a focus on literacy awareness targeting 500 households
• Led a team of 5 staff members and 10+ workshop facilitators with a $70,000 USD budget
• Created a Public Editorials Donation Network with the participation of private and public publishing houses, 30+ donors, and government institutions responsible for supplying 40 community libraries

Workshops consisted of a series of activities for all ages, with the goal of sharing participants stories through storytelling and book binding workshops directed by artist Lisa Torske. Later, these books were presented and displayed in several libraries across the city. Aditionally, the childrens area of two separate libraries were redesigned and further developed by zur-ich art colective.

Exhibitions of the books that were written and bound by 150 participants across the city were then presented in outdoor events at the Quito public libraries network. A final exhibition with the material developed during all of the workshops was presented at the Metropolitan Cultural Center of Quito. Participants of this event were able to create a collective book about local jargon.

Mural interventions were installed adjacent to the Quito public libraries to promote intergenerational literacy activities. Scavenger hunts were used to invited participants to search for clues in their community to complete a story that was written with fragments of information from their neighborhood. David Hinojosa was the typography artist who created a remarkable visual installation through using free hand calligraphy art for each of these murals.

Instructional guide for the storytelling and book binding workshop
Free Download here

Retablo de Don Atlas was a visual research project coordinated by anthropologist Blanca Muratorio and historian Eduardo Kingman Garcés. My role in the project was to research and document ethnographic materials of traditional art in Ecuador and to design, develop and maintain a web site as a final product to exhibit the collections of photos/documents, audio and videos.

Researcher and co-author of a publication about the traditional art used to make handwritten signs in Quito, Ecuador . This archive of images includes graphic arts such as calligraphy, typography, painting, illustration and stencil. Local artists were interviewed in order to have a deeper understanding of their studies, inspirations and technical skills. This research considers this artwork as part of an urban landscape that represent the local culture and advocates for their revitalization in a context where these pieces has been replaced due to public regulation policies.

Artist David Hinojosa began his art studies at the age of 8, when he won a scholarship to get into the school of Bellas Artes in Guayaquil, Ecuador. He learned from the artist Jacinto Garaicoa by doing natural scenery drawings at the cemeteries. He has traveled around Ecuador for more than 30 years creating exclusive designs to his clients. He developed several styles of calligraphy and used humor as an important part of visual communication in his art work.

Ojo al Aviso book
Photographic panorama, design, typography, arts and popular visual communication of Quito. Published by the Ministry of Culture, Ecuador.

Free Download here:

This publication was the result of a creative process where members of the Latin King and Queen Nation co-organized a visual communication program in partnership with the FLACSO Latin American Faculty for Social Science . My role in this program was graphic design facilitator and coordinator of the collaborative process that culminated with this publication