Keynotes

DIANA SIERRA

Co-Founder & CEO Be Girl INC, Country Representative of Be Girl Mozambique LTD

Bio:

“Good design is simple, resourceful, aspirational and responsive; but its even more important that design should be inclusive. I believe that every person has the right to feel ownership of products that fill him or her with pride and a sense of dignity. I am dedicated to creating extremely affordable and high-performance products that support, enhance and enable women’s and girls’ autonomy and confidence while generating opportunities to radically improve their quality of life, in other words: empowering women through design. I believe deeply that the role of design is to improve people’s lives at all levels, regardless of their circumstances and limitations. In this way, it is central to help communities in challenging environments to work with the available resources and generate suitable and practical products and solutions upon which they can build and propel themselves towards a sustainable future. Design is just a word unless it has a purpose!”

Diana Sierra is the co-founder and CEO at Be Girl, a social enterprise focused on empowering women by design, dedicated to creating extremely affordable, aspirational and high performance products that support women and girls’ autonomy and generate opportunities to radically improve their quality of life. For more information on Be Girl, click here.

In developing countries, she has worked in Africa and South America on better designs for cookstoves, agro-processing machines, soil testing devices and women empowerment programs through business and design.

Diana built her career in industrial design as a consultant, working for almost 15 years for different multinational companies and consultancy firms such as on Smart Design, Frog Design, Nike, Panasonic, Energizer, Tommy Hilfiger, Arnell Group, Curve ID, B.Robinson, and Playtex.

Diana holds a Master of Science degree in Sustainability Management from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Industrial Design from the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.

Title: Designing the Trojan Horse

Introduction: In a world where more than 4.5 billion people in emerging economies live on less than US $ 10 a day, it is imperative to change the way in which designers and industry think about our role in economic development and improving living conditions and health challenges of more than half the planet living in conditions on the edge of poverty. To understand a little more thoroughly, we have to understand that design is a complete world full of opportunities and is very related to social impact, more than we think. When finding a problem, we found an opportunity to intervene from the design. This is how Be Girl INC was born, a company of a social nature that is challenging the QUO status and using design to re-market, re-brand the concept of menstruation as something beautiful, to celebrate, feel proud and with the agency.

Talking about menstruation is considered something taboo from the Amazon to the Serengeti, “Designing the Trojan Horse” is a design talk that explains step by step from the generation of the problem to the execution and implementation of the “SmartCycle” design. A technologically simple design, a “Manual App” that is revolutionizing the way in which girls, boys and vulnerable populations are made accessible, basic and relevant concepts in their sexual and reproductive health, such as knowing the basic foundations of how the menstrual cycle works from the point of view of “Body Literature”.

Designing the Trojan Horse shows a creative process where design is used to infiltrate closed cultures and dismantle stigmas, rethinking the problem of lack of access to sexual and reproductive education, as something much simpler and more practical than understanding the body as something mechanic, which we can read, understand and manage with tools that allow us to have control and agency over it. An example of the democratization of access to design, health, education and decision-making capacity, all wrapped in a small but powerful clock, which combines icons, numbers and sounds to indicate the passage of time through the phases of the menstrual cycle, such that it becomes an experience and relevant knowledge easy to internalize.

Workshop: Designing the Trojan Horse

“Designing the Trojan Horse” workshop Diana Sierra will share in detail not only the SmartCycle design process, it will deepen the tools designed to validate the impact of scale design in an investigation funded by UNFPA, which seeks to measure the impact of access to knowledge about menstrual cycle in girls and boys and the ability to relate this information to basic knowledge of sexual and reproductive education.

In this workshop, we will explore from the formulation of the hypothesis to the design of the research methodology and data collection tools. A complete step by step that will not only allow us to follow the evolution of a design, even more important than the process of designing for impact.