Decolonizing Design from a Latinx Perspective


This event is online.
Admission is free.

To participate, go to https://hopin.com/events/fernandes-vita and register for the event.

How can we create more inclusive environments? Why do we have only 3% of Latinxs working in tech in the United States? How do we know some solutions might be experienced differently by marginalized groups or groups outside your own?

Diversity has the goal to bring more people to the table, and decolonizing is more about proposing an exercise to influence the way we think. Latinxs account for a large percentage of the Silicon Valley population (26%). The Latinx community will double in population in the next 30 years, and yet, less than 3% of them are in the high-tech industry according to the Hispanic Foundation of Silicon Valley.

Thaisa Fernandes and Jane Vita will explore colonialism's effect on design standards in regards to the influence of ideas perception and also representation in different industries, especially tech.

You will learn:

How solutions might be experienced in someone else’s shoes in a different way.
How we all should be an active agent of change and help to foster a more inclusive environment.

Thaisa Fernandes

Host & Producer at Latinx in Power Podcast | Program Manager at Twitter
San Francisco, California, United States

Thaisa Fernandes is currently a Program Manager at Twitter part of the Platform Solutions team working with the Twitter Ads API.

Thaisa is also a host and producer at Latinx in Power, https://latinxinpower.com, which is a podcast dedicated to demystify tech, interviewing Latinx leaders all over the world to get their perspective, encouragement and insights.

She considers herself a perfectionist in recovery, willing to stretch herself and risk making mistakes to achieve innovative solutions and validate learnings. Proud Latina in tech who lives in the San Francisco bay area for almost a decade and loves to road trip.

Product Owner (PSPO), PMI & Scrum Master (PSM) certified. Thaisa loves to solve problems, ask interesting questions, and help businesses create awesome products and programs. If you want to chat more and recommend a book, feel free to send Thaisa a tweet: https://twitter.com/thaifernandes

Jane Vita

Designer Lead at VTT
Helsinki, Finland

Jane Vita is currently a Designer Lead at VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland).

With over 20 years of career, Jane has experienced various design fields, such as Visual, Interaction, Service Innovation and Digital Strategy Design, within multiple projects in different industries and countries. She taught courses on Service Design in the Digital Context at Laurea University and teaches the course Designing Services with New Technologies at Aalto University and Design Thinking in the Gamification Applied to Digital Platforms program at Post PUC Digital. She regularly shares her work in publications, workshops and conferences.

Currently, Jane is Design Lead at the Technological Center of Finland, VTT, where her daily work is about creating bridges between innovative technologies and sustainable, human and ethical futures, supporting the research impact's maximisation. In the past, Jane worked at agencies like Fjord, Futurice and Digitalist, and organizations like Positivo Inform·tica, Lojas Renner and Di·rio de Pernambuco. Jane believes that design-challenges must be approached holistically and systemically; and that designers can facilitate and engage in the dissolution of any challenge and build a better world.