I’m Amanda Carvalho, an award-winning Brazilian designer based on Treaty No. 1 Territory a.k.a. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. These are the traditional lands of the Anishinabe (Ojibway), Ininew (Cree), Oji-Cree, Dene, and Dakota, and is the Birthplace of the Métis Nation and the Heart of the Métis Nation Homeland.

I’ve been working with agencies, design studios, startups, art institutions, universities, organizations and corporations for the past ten years. My expertise areas of work are branding, service design and UX/UI. I hold a MA in Cultural Studies at the University of Winnipeg and a BA in Visual Communication with a Major in Graphic Design at Centro Universitário SENAC. Besides creating ecosystem-centred branding strategies and design thinking for innovative problem-solving, my research interests involve exploring intersections between visual cultures, performance, and creative methodologies as decolonizing tools.

So you might be wondering: why did a designer decide to do a Masters in Cultural Studies? Isn’t that a bit random? Well, to be honest, when I joined my MA program I did it because I was at a point in my career that I wanted to do something new and I was always drawn to race, gender and post-colonial studies on a personal level. I’m a privileged immigrant woman of colour from the Global South and my ethnically ambiguous self is a result of the colonial project. In the curatorial stream, I was able to approach these topics from an art and museum studies perspective, which also fascinates me. Right off the bat, I started noticing some possible connections between design and cultural studies that at a first glance, don’t seem to be very obvious.

Design is informed by culture and informs culture. As the cultural studies scholar, Paul du Gay describes, “designers have to embody culture in the things they design.” When we are creating a design for a specific purpose, we are embedding it with meaning by adding symbolic significance through form and function. Therefore, designers are key cultural intermediaries. And if we are cultural intermediaries, I want to make sure I’m doing my work with purpose and aligned with my personal values. My comprehensive academic background, work and lived experience inform the way I design through embodied, conscious, critical and intersectional lenses from a situated BIWOC standpoint.