Abstract:

Una Ofrenda: Design as a Relational Practice is a thesis book project that weaves memoir, design criticism, cultural research, spiritual inquiry, and educational praxis into a living altar—an offering to those who seek to remake the world through creative action grounded in care and community.

At its core, this work resists the reductive view of design as neutral, universal, or only in service to capitalism. Instead, it says out loud what has always been true:  graphic design is a relational and contextual practice—rooted in place, shaped by position, and influenced by a constellation of forces. These include the Marxist categories of culture—race, gender, class, ideology, and sexuality—as well as decolonial perspectives that center Land, communal belonging, and culture expressed through visual, written, spoken, and ceremonial forms.

The framework for this project mirrors the construction of a memorial ofrenda—a central element in the Día de Muertos ceremony, where ancestors and their stories are honored and preserved. The book-length manuscript unfolds as eight nichos, or miniature altars, each one devoted to a facet of my positionality. Together, they explore how my lived experience shapes both my design practice and my approach to teaching. This work draws deeply from Indigenous epistemologies, Chicana feminism, decolonial theory, and my roles as a mother, friend, educator, gardener, and artist—one who carries both Indigenous and settler ancestry, and lives with the complexity, responsibility, and grace that this inheritance requires.

This project asks: 

• What might it look like to center collective care in design practice?

• How can design classrooms become ecosystems of relational learning rather than competitive silos?

• What happens when ancestral knowledge, spiritual practice, and personal narrative are not excluded from design but become its foundation?

Rather than offering singular answers, this work cultivates responses from within lived, relational sites of inquiry:

• Parenting becomes a site of research, illuminating how the daily labor of nurturing children teaches us to center care, flexibility, and intuition, offering a model for how design might hold space for difference, interdependence, and growth.

• The Garden becomes a teacher of ecosystems, revealing how tending to the diverse needs of plants invites us to consider the diverse needs of people. It models stewardship, patience, seasonal timing, and the reciprocity between tending and being tended to.

• The Ofrenda becomes a method of research rooted in ceremony and cultural memory. As an altar of offerings, it holds stories, artifacts, and intentions, and shows how knowledge can be shared within a community through oral traditions, symbolic language, and collaborative creativity.

This work critiques the failings of both modernism and postmodernism, along with the extractive, capitalist modes of design education and production that have shaped our field. It acknowledges that design does not exist in a vacuum—it is deeply implicated in systems of power, and often reinforces white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonial erasure when left unexamined.

Rather than asking us to mask, correct, or erase our biases, this project invites a more nuanced view: that some biases are in fact forms of cultural expertise. It challenges the impulse to dilute creative vision in favor of palatability, and instead advocates for full-spectrum awareness—one that intentionally includes cultural stakeholders and uplifts perspectives from communities that have been strategically marginalized. It calls for an expansion of design thinking that is dialectical, plural, guided by complexity, and accountable to the ecosystems of meaning we inhabit and shape.

One of the problems of design that is specifically named here is the colonial narrative of design as a savioristic tool—and the designer as a solitary hero—Una Ofrenda calls for repositioning design and designers as members of a problem-solving community, where each contribution is valued, and design is no more or less precious than any other act of care, labor, or wisdom.

The book concludes by affirming that every act of design—and every act of design education—whether a book, logo, illustration, annual report, lesson plan, or syllabus, is an altar dedicated to a value system. And as such, each becomes a potential site for the miracle of transformation.

“This is not a manual or a manifesto. It is an ofrenda—a living altar of care, built to support the collective ability of “someones” to teach, learn, and create in a new way, to slow down, to trust your intuition, and to bring your full self into the work.”