We cannot separate from the state without breaking rules. We cannot change the capitalist economic system without breaking rules. I know what you are thinking, breaking rules is easy, but what for? The main position I follow for designing for Circles.Cooperative and Circles.Garden is: I want to enable fertile ground for the creation of other rules. Rules that every community can choose, define, modify and destroy for their autonomy not to be overtaken by any state nor any dominant alternative to it.

Such a design approach does not only come after working for Circles, but from my life experience, and my positionality as a decolonial designer, who strives for autonomy-based and feminist technology.

Anecdote 2_ 2012, 2013 of occidental calendar. In the territory called Uruguay: I was visiting my parents, and as usual, I was helping them with their computer, running updates, cleaning their disk, installing some new software and so on… Crazy causality, by the time I finished with it, Facebook had launched an interface up-date. Sadly for me, Facebook was the first thing my father opened when I told him the computer was now ready to be used. He was angry with me, disoriented in front of the machine just repeating “you broke my computer, you broke my computer!”. It took me some time to realize what he meant, as I was there checking all functions, everything was just fine, and Facebook, an unfamiliar platform for me already at that time, looked like a normal Social Media interface.

(!)The first mistake I made: I didn’t encourage the frustration about some omniscience structure to change his account from one day to the other without his consent.

(!)The second mistake I made: I did not take the chance to talk about technology politics.

Anecdote 1_2020 of the occidental calendar. In unified (!) Germany: The mother of a very good friend, who was overwhelmed by the Covid pandemic, had a panic episode of “having lost google ‘’. For those familiar with German society, the pandemic shaped itself inside of these historically controversial borders in very individualistic ways, and people were mostly fearing for their individual privileges. We were having a coffee in the middle of the pandemic with my friend and his mother called him explaining that the totalitarian regime had reached a level she never expected. Google was just being shut down by the government: “First Corona, now Google”. All this sadness was created by a terms of services update on Google, from which the interface demanded their users to scroll down to find the “I Agree” button. Big surprise, one of the most used UX functions for Mobile devices, scrolling-down, does not follow all people(s) intuitions in the world. But demands for most of them to get indoctrinated on an alienated habitus.

(!)The first mistake we made: We explain google was just as fucked up fine as always. She was only seeing half of the screen, and showed her the path towards google again, and missed the chance to introduce her to Duck Duck Go.

(!)The second mistake we made: We didn’t have the time to talk to her and understand why she was putting Google at the same level as the Pandemic. And what dependency towards this software multinational, were actually provoking her such feeling of fear.

Back-end dependencies, the problematics of a “one protocol” solution.

The idea that we can develop one protocol that fits everyone’s needs, is not new. We have seen this before. It used to be called nation-state or representative democracy. The worst thing, these ideas were the result of one of the most prominent revolutions of occidental history. I know, this hurts!

Just as the nation-states did not turn into a true alternative to the paradigms of monarchy, unified protocols do not look to me as a proper path if we seek to facilitate a basic income system for communities that can properly attend to each community’s needs and wills.

Design is power, it was thought of as a power tool, and even if I strive hard not to use it this way, in a world divided by those who ideate and those who implement. I cannot think of any application of design that does not involve domination. With this very sad truth in my hands and mind, is that I constantly build on my positionality as Decolonial Designer, from which inclusion is a key aspect.

Inclusive Design has a long tradition of struggle. The notion of inclusion, was one of the most significant radical positions that confronted my stereotyped thinking, while I was still a Design Student, and it is today one of the most practical approaches I know for confronting technocracy.

I do not think I can define my work as Inclusive Design — because I do not follow the demand of this struggle and I’m not an active part of the movement. I want to be very transparent on this because I do not intend to appropriate anybody’s fight. On the contrary, I owe the Inclusive Design Movement, the fact that since I first got in contact with such an approach, my entire dimensions of what Design means has been on constant re-shaping.

I work since then on defining what my position towards Inclusion is, and today it is much shaped by Decolonial and Radical Feminist thinking.

For me there is no product, service or even life situation that does not exclude people. Inclusion is for me a position towards understanding the exclusion process I provoke and being transparent about them. Every decision I make in product design involves prioritization. And this process is strictly aligned to the political positions I follow. Therefore transparency in my/our decisions is essential to avoid frustration, both in the communities using what I design, like you, and in all people involved in the design process.

Inclusion means to me on the one hand the acceptance of differences to break hegemonies and capitalist ‘normalities’, to allow different ontologies to be represented on technology. This means that I work to take into account cultural experiences, class realities, gender identities, people with disabilities, people without disabilities, in short different life experiences. Inclusion stands for me as a way to acknowledge differences and work towards constellations in which they can co-exist.