As social design and design for development continue to gain relevance within design education and practice, the consideration and conscious integration of context-based methods that focus on locality and culture are critical in order to guarantee respectful and caring design outcomes. In the last decade, my University of Florida colleagues María Rogal, Raúl Sánchez and I have developed social design research in Latin America that keeps leading us to the revision and reconsideration of such issues. They not only pertain to design, but to language and rhetoric, corresponding directly with world views and local practices of populations from the borders and “peripheral spaces” (Medina, 2017), who have been invisible from traditional and Eurocentric/Westernised design theory and learning.

non-peer-reviewed