[Dicho por Rab] El Research Center for Material Culture es una institución ubicada en Leiden, en los Países Bajos, dedicada al estudio de la etnografía. Cada año escoge entre cuatro y cinco becarios junior de investigación para desarrollar un tema, y fui una de las receptoras en una edición pasada. En This Wasn’t Designed for Me, el ensayo resultante, investigué cómo grupos transcontinentales como las mujeres, las mujeres musulmanas y los motoristas con casco representan a millones de personas que no son tomadas en cuenta por el diseño de los aparatos portátiles tecnológicos.
Para muestra, un párrafo del ensayo.
The Modulor was a racist and sexist anthropometric scale of proportions. Le Corbusier based his housing designs around a healthy white European man of 183 centimetres, even rejecting the female form due to its purported lack of harmony. With modernism, design became a form of eugenics. As the Venezuelan researcher Fabiola López-Durán has argued, when Lúcio Costa imported modernism to create Brasilia, the city ended up being designed for the elite; even the black hands that built the new capital had to live in a satellite city. So to this day, Latin American modernism is associated with economic disparity instead of being the equaliser it was supposed to be. It ended up being something aesthetically and functionally available only to those at the top of the food pyramid.
