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Xinia Varela-Sojo is a Costa Rican Industrial Designer, graduated at Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica. She got her Master cum laude degree in Strategic Design at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. In Costa Rica, she has worked as a conceptual product designer, furniture designer and as a freelance consultant in design innovation strategies. In Italy, she worked in Ferrero Group S.p.A as an intern in strategic design proposing innovative product-service systems ideas for a new product launch. Today, she is a full-time professor at Design School in Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (TEC) and she is coursing a doctoral program in design at Universidad de Palermo (UP), Argentina. Her thesis is part of the Research and Development of Latin American Design Program and it’s related to Design and Economy area at UP. At TEC her thesis is related to Design and Innovation research area and her focus is on the relation between the design process and the innovation process management in Industrial Design SME’s in Costa Rica. She is also working in a design project called Algo por Hacer, which belongs to TEC’s Design School and its purpose is to create design awareness in local public policies for social and design innovation. She is member of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Carreras de Diseño Industrial in Argentina (UP) and has written articles and participated in seminars in Costa Rica, Argentina and Panamá related to design management, social design, design innovation, design education and design entrepreneurship.

Which kind of contribution has provided to your career the MDS experience?
At MDS Program I learned about design value and its strategic role to make changes in today’s and tomorrow’s economy. I was able to use my experience as industrial designer and the knowledge I got in the MDS program in order to propose changes in industrial design education at TEC and explore unattended areas where design research can generate opportunities in the Latin American context for the creative economy, industrial designers and communities. MDS program let me experience networking between excellent colleagues who became from different countries and backgrounds.

Outline the MDS experience according four keywords or key adjectives:

Visionary, Design empowerment, Open-minded, Multi/trans disciplinary.

Would you suggest this experience to other professionist?
I have to say that I already suggested this program to my colleagues and I will continue suggesting it: it’s an experience every designer (or no-designer) must live in order to change the world perspective of design value.