Uruguayans who design
A place to showcase the work of talented Uruguayan designers to the world.
Uruguay is pretty well known for soccer and maybe for a number of odd facts as being the country with the most southern capital city in the world, the one with the oldest opera house in South America and because of being champions on having a ratio of four cows per citizen. There is a whole bunch of other reasons why to look into Uruguay. One of those less known is its design community.
A few days ago I came across Brazilians Who Design, an amazing initiative led by Fabricio Teixeira and built by Zeh Fernandes on top of what Jules Forrest kindly made available on GitHub after building Women Who Design. That immediately triggered the interest in what they have done and the question followed:
Why not have Uruguayans Who Design?
And it made sense!
Why did it make sense?
Well, mainly because it is a small community but with very good outcomes in terms of design quality. But also because there is a number of Uruguayan designers that are either working abroad, on large companies, designing and building products used by millions that are maybe less known in the international scenario.
There is also a number of designers that could easily stand out more and reach a larger audience by being part of a consolidated repository. However, that would not be the key objective of this initiative, but much more the one of inspiring new designers to diversify their references, experienced designers to diversify their network, and companies to diversify their teams — as Fabricio very well stated on the sibling website.
What happened immediately after this site went online?
The minute I started sharing the website with some fellow designers that are currently listed, we started talking mostly about categorization and which of those listed are effectively areas of expertise whereas some others are roles within a given area of expertise. Much has changed since the categorization available on day one, but I realize there is still much to do around this topic.
At this point the list is being categorized by: Head of Design, Product Designer, UX Researcher, UX Designer, UX Consultant, UX Writer, UI Designer, Illustrator, Visual/Graphic Designer, Founder, Creative/Art Director, Motion Designer, Visual Thinker, Typographer, Interior Designer, Fashion Designer, Textile Designer and Landscape Designer.
As a subtopic of categorization, part of the conversation went around defining the fringe of design: What is design? What should be included? Should for instance architecture be included? I guess there is still a long way to go before we reach a final state but the least I can say is that most of the conversations have been nutritious, engaging and they had a lot to do with the purpose of having this site up, building community and cultivating relationships. And that is a lot of what we do both as humans or designers.
So what’s with pride?
Designers are curious, don´t fear exploring and in many cases are tinkerers, slightly improving things while in other cases they come up with completely new solutions, either to long-known problems or to completely new ones. In all cases we are putting something new into the world and that is something to be proud of and share without being shy. That is why when you share the link you will be telling others how proud you are about what you are and what you do and how you think it makes things better.
Growing the list
If you know Uruguayan designers that are not yet part of the list please nominate them. There is a place for that purpose within the site and you can always fill in this form.
I really hope you enjoy it:
Ideas & Suggestions? Please reach out!
If you enjoyed those odd facts about Uruguay at the beginning, let us not fall short, you can find a lot more at uruguayisguay.com
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Andrés Richero is Director of Experience Design for Oracle NetSuite based in Montevideo, Uruguay. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent Oracle’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
