© 2025. All rights reserved.
© 2025. All rights reserved.
As a part of the Co-Design 2022 program with the MIT Media Lab and Colombian nonprofit Diversa, I collaborated with Red Mujere, a rural women’s collective in the highlands of Bogata, Colombia, on the design & dissemination of locally-made tools for community control of the invasive gorse plant (Ulex europaeus).
Gorse plants, known as ‘retamo,’ are an invasive shrub that threaten the local ecosystem of the Colombian highlands, particularly the paramos, an alpine tundra ecosystem unique to the region. The women of Red Mujere are committed to mitigating the spread of retamo and educating their local community about effective means of plant control.
My team and I participated in weekly meetings with the farm and paid two field visits over the course of the semester, engaging community members and local stakeholders in all steps of the ideation and design process. We prototyped a claw-based tool that was suitable for women and children to remove young gorse plants from the soil. We also experimented with making charcoal briquettes out of plant waste to fuel the cookstoves used in the region. Finally, we created an educational pamphlet based on our findings to better inform community members about the origins of the plant and how to properly mitigate their spread.
