The Women’s Association of Chira Island was established in 1999 as a unique and pioneering community-based ecotourism project in their island, located in the North Pacific region of Costa Rica.
The project’s national recognition contrasts with the endless obstacles and challenges that this association’s members have confronted in order to attain success. For over 20 years, the association’s work motivated its members to challenge any negative self-perception and to question social and gender roles as entrepreneurs in a traditionally misogynistic area.
My MFA creative project was developed in part during three field research visits to Chira Island between 2009 and 2010, with support of a scholarship granted by the Tinker Fund (Center for Latin American Studies of the University of Florida). I employed ethnographic and design research methods to explore the concepts of time, space, and voice to visually communicate the story of this ecotourism association, their members, and their project’s implications in the community and within their families.
The resulting exhibition and related storytelling materials were designed for easy mobility and reproduction. They intend to motivate other women in rural areas in Costa Rica and Latin America to fearlessly develop their own entrepreneurial initiatives.
This project explores the relevance of visual storytelling, design research, and creative fieldwork methods to produce context-specific information that inform collaborative design processes and that help designers to better understand real-world needs. Being in direct contact with people, witnessing their lifestyle, needs and motivations, is the antithesis to studio work that exists in a vacuum. We need to intentionally carve channels for discussion to improve the communication and collaboration when working with communities.
SHORT DOCUMENTARY
A representation of their story through voice, I developed a twelve minute video when the women tell their story themselves. It is divided into chapters, where the women speak about the beginning of their association, the limitations that women in the island have confronted to improve their economy and livelihood, the planning of their ecotourism project, and the support they have received from different national and international development entities.
This video almost exclusively employs recorded interviews from my first field-research visit to the island, in spaces such as La Amistad Lodge and Palito Port where the majority of the women live.
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DISSEMINATION
This project was presented as a case study at the Design Research Society Biannual Conference 2016 in Brighton, UK. Download full paper.
Map of Connections
This map was first developed as a book, composed of different layers visualizing economy, the community’s social and gender roles, religion, the relation between the members of the association with their husbands and their families, and women’s identity. As a large piece, the map represents in one layer these connections with color, incorporating images of places and community members contextualized using thick descriptions.
Timeline
After the production of the “Map of Connections,” I developed a timeline that represents ten years in the story of the association. This timeline is divided into two levels: the upper section shows facts and historic information that relate to the development of the association, its relation with other groups and associations in Chira Island, and media appearances. The lower section shows activities developed by the association during those years once formed, milestones, and dissemination.
Altered Testimonies
As visual aids to the Timeline, I developed a series of collages that resulted from an altered book project informed by my field research activities and the life and story of the women’s association. These collages show different visual explorations of texture, color, text, image, and interviews from field trips. Mixing these mediums and excerpts of testimonies resulted in visually engaging portraits of the story, where both the message and the visuals support different facts along the Timeline.
