Creative Sustainability Design: Andrea Valladares

Andrea Valladares
Co-founder & CEO of PERPENDICULAR – Social Innovation Lab, Guatemala

Being a CS Design student helped me define my own path to pursue my interests and develop my skills to achieve sustainability in Guatemala. Despite the different difficulties of my country, I have found support for the concepts and skills acquired during the programme. CS gave me a lens for understanding the systemic constraints that limit sustainable development in this context, and this is now what I am using to develop my life and profession.

Today I am building a Social Innovation Lab – PERPENDICULAR – to support innovation in the public sector and create spaces of dialogue, participation and innovation through co-creation. Our experience addresses multiple themes: space design, urban development, community development, integrated risk management, and public policy on housing; and through it, I am practising what I learned at CS: to creatively and collectively understand problems and design solutions that, little by little, can transform the big system that we are all part of.