Maria Rogal is currently a professor of design at The University of Florida and her work spans disciplines, applications, and place. Her upbringing, education, and experiences have all been diverse, enriching, and make her the conscientious designer she is today. Always cognizant of visual language and environmental print, Rogal found her passion in design from the language barrier of growing up outside the United States. Moving from places ranging from Laos to Peru to Liberia, Rogal needed to be aware of the signs to maneuver around these different cultures and landscapes. When she returned to the United States for college, she majored in political science and shortly after graduation worked for a grassroots devolvement firm that worked in Columbia and Venezuela, where she then realized the way she was able to and had the potential to impact these people's lives. Coupled with her love of art, Rogal discovered design and went back to school for her bachelor's and her master's in design. Rogal's background in political science as well as design has allowed her to embrace systems thinking as a method of identifying and solving problems.

Her work is rooted in acknowledging the inequalities in these systems. These range from women's versus men's work, economic freedoms, and environmental justice. Currently, this can be summed up best by Rogal's work in actively working in decolonizing design. The undercurrent of her work is environmentalism and its looming impact on future design work. While design thinking is user-centered, Rogal includes the caveat that humans are not at the center by themselves, that their environment and its health is also a crucial part of the context of solutions to any problem.

Episode webpage: https://taylor.tulane.edu/design-thinking/hellopluriverse/maria-rogal/

About Maria Rogal

https://mariarogal.com/

https://arts.ufl.edu/directory/profile/1573

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariarogal/