Choosing a tiny country, with a population of barely over 5 million inhabitants, the 2021 edition of Interaction Latin America chose Costa Rica to host the event that gathers the global Interaction Design community.

The choice aimed to bring focus into the country’s capacity to inspire, diving into one question: What is the role of design in Latin American neighborhoods, cities, and among our people?

Owning 6% of the world’s biodiversity, Costa Rica inspires design through its peace, environmental protection, and happiness. From San José, ILA21 opened up space for a conversation around the impact of design in the Latin American region.

Check out the main themes discussed in ILA 2021:

Highlights of ILA21

Here’s a small summary of the main topics discussed in the second day of the event:

Affecting physical spaces through design

Mike Smith Masís opened the day talking about the ability to promote social justice through architecture and design.

The two disciplines combined have the power to catalyse agency in the spaces we inhabit, and a focused action can promote projects that promote fairer, regenerative environments that dignify the human condition.

Smith facilitates architecture projects in low-income neighborhoods, as well as rural, native and informal settlements, the true protagonists of the city.

Riskiest Assumption Tests

Guthemberg Silva and Willian Grillo made us see the usefulness of the Riskiest Assumption Tests as a very interesting possibility to help at the time of validation of the solution.

They showed how we use RAT to plan remote validation experiments of a digital application and thus better decide where to apply efforts to build an artifact for testing.

Silva is Interaction Designer in CESAR, and his work focuses on usability and user experience. Grillo is a Design Consultant, also in CESAR, leading projects in Usability, User Research, Experience Design and Services.

Expanding our vision of reality

José Chavarría proposed that we expand our human vision of reality by borrowing non-human senses.

From the perspective of speculative design, he uses sensory immersion experiments inspired by nature to show how this can modify the way we perceive our environment.

Chavarría is a Creative Technologist and resident professor at CIID, developing technological solutions for innovation projects.

The unresolved debts of the design field

Carolina Leslie made us look through the golden age of interaction design to talk about the issues that perpass the design profession, such as gender pay gap and clear racial discrimination in our practice.

She talked about the offer of opportunities in the area, the adaptation to the remote environment and the variation of wages in the pandemic period.

Leslie is a Digital Expert at McKinsey & Company, and is a veteran of the UX market. In the last 6 years she carried out Panorama UX, an annual research on the digital design market in Brazil.

The Bridge in ILA21

We had the privilege to have an interactive space at ILA to talk to the participants. It was a great opportunity for building a network with the brilliant professionals in the event, as well as presenting our company, talking more about how the recruitment process of designers happens at The Bridge and showing the opportunities we have available.

Wrapping up

Carrying “Growing from a place of strength” as a statement, ILA21 aimed to pave the way for the collaboration among the countries to design a favorable future together, reaching their maximum potential.

Speaking of the powerful talks presented there, the event was successful in inspiring growth and union between the Interaction Design global community.

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