Andrea Botero Cabrera

Especifically, my work engages with the possibilities, and contradictions of participating in design, and designing participation today. I have explored these issues in multiple domains ranging from everyday life to scientific endeavors.

Through my research, I aim to understand how collectives (broadly speaking) come to understand the design spaces available to them and how designers could infrastructure those spaces better, especially looking to support livable futures. These work draws from and happens at the intersection of participatory design, science and technology studies and transformative creative practice.

I am Associate Professor (New Frontiers of Design) at the Department of Design where I currently lead INUSE research group, where we work with designer-user relations in socio-technical change. In addition, I am adjunct professor (dosenti) at the Faculty of Architecture and Design of Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá (COL) and Guest Professor at the Centre for Sustainable and Digital Transformation, Aalborg University (DK).

My research has been funded by the European Union, The Finnish Research council, the Finnish fund for technology development and Aalto Univeristy seed funding programs.

I am interested in what counts as design and what other practices for world making are there, and which ones we need to call into being. Thus my research and practice not only aims to understand, I also I seek to resist, intervine and demonstrate alternatives. In that vein, my collaborative design practice explores the creation of environments, tools and media that afford more relational and caring interactions among, and between people, collectives and their environment. The OpenForest collective, practices and tools are one example of this.

Teaching 2024:

MUO-E8041  Collaborative and participatory techniques for design - Creative sustainability MA program (Fall) at the Department of Design

MUO-E0020 Intro to MA studies (Fall)- for all MA students of the Department of Design (Together with Prof Pirjo Kääriainen and Prof Marco Steimberg)

I advice / supervise MA and DA students on a continous basis.

BACKGROUND

BA- Industrial Design,Universidad Nacional de Colombia (COL) 

MA- Product and Strategic Design, Aalto University (FIN)

DA- Doctor of Arts - New Media, Aalto University (FIN)

I worked as post-doc at the department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Oulu (FIN).

As a design practitioner I have worked in several design consultancies and in multiple R&D projects as product owner, interaction designer and design researcher. I do occasional design consultancy gigs via a collective design research studio called Suo&co, that I convene with 3 wonderful friends for more than a decade.

In my spare time  I do design and multigenerational diversity activism through the board of Ninho ry, a Finnish NGO creating a more diverse and plurilingual children's culture in Finland. I ocassionally collaborate with Utopiabio, a Colombian NGO working around rural connectivity and technology appropiation as well as community development