Mexican designer Gerardo Osio’s work explores our relationship with nature, ecology and community. Through his fieldwork and collaborative approach, Osio not only highlights sociopolitical and environmental concerns but also the designer’s responsibility to embrace culture, tradition, and a better understanding of production processes and materials.
Q > Can you tell us a bit about your inspirations? What themes do you pursue and why?
A > For a few years now, I have been interested in doing research through design and using its tools to communicate that research. The themes that I pursue often are territory, culture and environment; in a way, I think it is the result of being born and grown in an big industrial city in the northeast of Mexico in which the general narrative of the Mexican country is not clearly present/represented in the culture and traditions of the region and that it has a very clear dissociation with the territory where is embedded. Being a situation that has been growing through the years, the city has been declared under a socio-environmental emergency since 2017. As a design professional, I have been looking for ways to use my practice to address these issues that are of great interest to me.
Q > What’s the most satisfying part of the creative process (and why)?
A > Learning from others has been the most satisfying aspect of the projects that I am involved in. As designers we are trained to make connections between elements and ideas in a project, but the connections between people are often neglected. I think that the relationships that are created through the process of a project is the most valuable part of it.
Q > What’s your biggest source of learning?
A > The experience and sharing with people. Reading is a must and we learn a lot from the books, but being in the field and getting my hands dirty is for sure where I learn the most; and that gets exponentiated through sharing those experiences and when others also share their own.
Q > Tell us about your project ‘Raíz Noreste’ and your relation with the materials you select — and how you use these to bring socio-political questions to the table.
A > The project “Raíz Noreste” is a research project about the pre-hispanic ethnicities that dwelled in the northeastern area of Mexico. It aims to ask the questions: Who were they? Why are they not there anymore? Why was their memory almost deleted? And how certain cultural heritage is still present in certain relationships with the territory and traditions.
The project communicates the research through a series of objects that juxtaposes materials and objects from the same region but that are (or were) products of ways of living of different people and in different times in history. The material coexists in a series of objects which expresses colonial actions that made invisible the history of these native groups and their cultural heritage. It aims to make visible the colonial history of the region which prevails in many aspects of the culture of this area of Mexico.
Raíz Noreste, 2019 (collection). Photography by Luis Talancón
Q > Do you feel that your collaborative project ‘Tierra de Saberes’ can catalyse social change?
A > I do. The idea of the project is to give a voice to the “people of craft” (as I like to refer to them) from the northeastern region of Mexico and to create routes of connections between them and people from the city, other neighbouring rural areas and outside the country.
Through Tierra de Saberes people get to know a specific aspect of the traditions of the territory and it brings interest to communities that are often left aside and that which destiny is often bound to disappear due to political and economical interests of the global market.
Tierra de Saberes (conversation with rope-maker Don Reyes). Photography by Jorge G. Balleza
Q > How has your sense of community differed from your teenage years to now?
A > As a teenager I have always been part of a certain community: being my family, my childhood friends, the Scouts Association (until 18 years old) or my parkour team; in every small community there was a sense of helping each other. Now that extrapolates into the projects I am involved in; I believe that teamwork and the collaboration with others is key to envisioning new and better futures. I don’t think that my sense of community has changed much, maybe just grown.
Q > Sustainability: awareness and change — How do you see design practices evolving to tackle these issues? How can we encourage a better understanding and the need for cooperation?
A > Circular Biodesign was born with two interests, one was to use design as a tool to do research about an specific subject: the possibility of biomaterials as a tool for sustainable futures, and the other one was to involve industry, the academy and design in order to develop an interdisciplinary thinking that could also be integrated into the students’ professional practice. The collaboration between my friend Pedro Arturo Ruiz, the company Polybion, the Autonomous University of Nuevo León and the students proved that these kind of strategies can bring positive inputs and outcomes for the the academy and the industry learning from each other processes, but more importantly it helps to foresee more sustainable futures together.
Q > Do you have any other specific projects you are working on these days?
A > Right now I am doing research and developing for my thesis project in Design Academy Eindhoven which investigates the relationships between the city of Monterrey Metropolitan Area in northeast Mexico with its geographical territory, specifically focusing on the mountains. This project seeks to understand this relationship through social, political, economical and environmental lenses and to communicate how the geography configures the city in all these different aspects. This project also brings different voices to the table, from the people that live in the neighbourhoods near the mountains to professionals and experts from different fields.
Gerardo Sandoval Osio (1991) is a designer from Monterrey, México. He studied industrial design in the “Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León” (UANL), and has studies in traditional Japanese crafts and modern design at the Kyoto Institute of Technology (KIT, Kyoto, Jp).
He participated at FONCA’s “Jóvenes Creadores” 2018 program and served as a teacher at UANL (2017 to 2020) and CEDIM (2018 to 2020), both design universities in Monterrey, Mexico.
Gerardo develops design projects as an independent professional. He is co-founder of “Tierra de Saberes”, a project which investigates, documents and disseminates traditional knowledge embedded in the territory of northeastern México along Cristóbal López Carrera, Nydia Prieto and Jorge Balleza. This project is created and developed in teamwork with Priscila Treviño, Rodolfo Lavenant and Mónica Guzmán.
He works together with the company Polybion, Mexican biomaterials developer, and Pedro Arturo Ruíz under the project “Circular Biodesign”, a project that focusses on research and design with biomaterials.
His designs and projects have been shown in exhibitions such as Abierto Mexicano de Diseño (CDMX, Mx), Design Week México (CDMX, Mx), Campamento Feria (Gdj, Mx), Tokyo Design Week (Jp) and Milan Design Week (It).
Currently, he is pursuing the master’s program in Geo-Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE, NL).
