Ana Belén Palacios

Ana Belén Palacios is a designer and design researcher. Her research explores design as an agent of either cultural colonization or emancipation of women's lifeworlds in Ecuador, focusing on their experiences within the intertwinement of coloniality, gender, nature, and design.

Her PhD project ›WomenAmasamientoNature‹ explores how women articulate and enact design practices embedded in their interrelations with nature in Ecuador's territories through their oral tradition and living memory. Her work draws on Abya Yala's feminisms and antipatriarchal movements, decoloniality, and design.

Her professional experience as a designer in various Latin American countries allowed her to engage with diverse communities to ground design in local histories. She witnessed firsthand how mainstream design can contribute to cultural assimilation and recognized the potential for local design to act as a form of resistance.

These experiences inspired her interest in examining design's social and political implications as a world-making practice.

Ana is a Ph.D. candidate in the MAKE/SENSE program at the Basel Academy of Art and Design and the University of Arts Linz.