Contexts of work
Colombia
United States
Mexico
Finland
Adriana Santamaría
I believe that design thinking is a problem-solving approach that should be available to everyone, so I share it as a way to strengthen local communities.
Adriana is a design strategist focused on social impact. She has 8 years of experience leading and facilitating participatory design processes for organisations and grassroots communities and is committed to reframing society's most pressing challenges into opportunities that create long-lasting value. The social change she explores is deeply rooted in her Colombian identity. She is constantly looking for new ways of strengthening community capacities that help them break cycles of socioeconomic inequalities.
As an entrepreneur, she has co-founded a visual communication studio, a design for social impact workshop, and an education non-profit. Altogether, she has 15 years of experience helping people and companies visualise, structure, develop, explain, and present ideas that lead them on to new opportunities. By approaching every opportunity as a design challenge, she has contributed to social-driven and organisational projects for clients like UNICEF, UNDP, Google Colombia, TEDx, Colombia’s Ministry of Education, and Ministry of IT, among others.
She is an industrial designer from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, specialised in multimedia design at Universidad Nacional de Colombia and holds an MBA in Design Strategy from California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
