Interests: child friendly neighborhoods, child-centered urbanism & activism, social design, ecological urbanities, community, family & human development
Carolina is a doctoral graduate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, with research and interest focus across the fields of human development, semiotics and social psychology, design thinking and social design, ecological urbanities and healthy environments, risk and resilience in early childhood and community development, child friendly design processes in family planning and policy making, design and implementation of child friendliness in neighborhoods, child advocacy & activism, to name a few.
As an architect, designer, urban planner, community activist, strategist and veracious child advocate, with masters degrees in social housing (ETH, 2010) and strategic design (IED, 2007), she envisions, works, advocates and believes in Design as less of a distorted semiotic and imagetic privileged product and as more of an anonymous, autonomous and just constructive process of service, across governments, geographical territories and social constructions, where all realities and peoples matter.
Whether in Brazil, Switzerland, Norway, Mexico, Bolivia or USA, so far, her evolving mindset is built through design and professorship practices in diverse fields and scales of the design process. More recently, she’s been working on research and grassroots actions with vulnerable populations, fostering families suffering eviction, volunteering, managing and leading community-based activism in homeless shelters for children and youth. She’s been collaborating with foster care systems, government and local non-profits in private and public partnerships and helping homeless children, families, young moms and their babies in vulnerable circumstances. As an innovation capacity strategist at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, co-chair of Brazil GSD, and involved with venture incubation at the Harvard I-Lab, she’s been building collaborative knowledge and cross disciplinary thinking between the schools of Design, Education, Public Health, Government and Business, now turning them into new pathways of conversation, paradigm and action towards and beyond social design.