maria rogal

Our new MFA in Design at the University of Florida is set to launch in fall 2019. Its origins are with the d4d work and expands and creates new models to solve real-world problems facing a wide range of communities in Florida and beyond. The program will reflect and contribute to...

UF Design Professors Gaby Hernández and María Rogal, along with Rául Sánchez of UF’s Department of English, led an international group of designers and design educators in a conversation titled “Transforming Design: Indigeneity and Mestizaje in Latin America.”

Raúl Sánchez (UF English) and I published an essay, “Co-Designing for Development,” in the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Design (ed. Rachel Beth Egenhoefer). Our essay uses my decade-long design research initiative, Design for Development, a collaboration with indigenous...

  I recently attended the Design Incubation Fellowship in NYC. It was one of the most relevant, informative, and inspiring professional experiences of my life and certainly the best recently. There were many things that made this great. Here are a few: As a field, we need...

In 2010, students in Technologies and Processes collaborated with NGO Impala Development Services (Swaziland) to create a name, identity, and packaging for Moringa Powder to be sold in Swaziland and South Africa. The moringa tree is fast growing and drought resistant and has the...

I had the pleasure of working with Rongfei Geng while he was an MFA student at the University of Florida. I ran across his creative project work recently—An Ideal University Life—which was an exploration of expectations, hopes, fears, and experiences of Chinese youth in and after...

I stumbled on the bio of Anna Children Atkins, a 19th century botanist, artist, and photographer. She may very well have been the first female photographer.

For some time I have been fascinated with notebooks, in part for how we can document ideas and everyday happenings and make connections. This is an interesting article from Masokumi where the connection between the physical act of writing is discussed in the context of long-term...

On Thursday I made a brief presentation on the work of D4D at the UF Innovations in International Development Symposium. What always impresses me is the range of work being done at UF—well beyond what I see on a daily basis. These are colleagues working all over the world who...

Project: An intercultural calendar that comparatively presents Wixárika and western concepts of time. The design solution visually documents one Wixárika community’s (San Miguel Huaixtita, Jalisco, México) oral tradition of time in the community’s own words. Background:...