Biography
Dr. Guillermina Noël is a design researcher and educator. She is the Head of the Bachelor Design Management, International. She is proud to be part of the Hochshcule Luzern, a community of scholars dedicated to excellence in education for the benefit of society.
In her design practice Guillermina develops strategies to enhance people’s capacity to collectively make sense of situations. She applies an evidence-based approach to design. Develops safe spaces for interaction to co-design action and foster mutual learning. She helps make the interdependency with others visible. She seeks diversity of perspectives, avoids simplifying complexity, and dualistic thinking.
Prior to joining the Lucerne University of Applied Arts & Sciences, Guillermina was a designer at the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Alberta, Canada. Guillermina works with multidisciplinary health teams to improve care practices (Quality Improvement) or to transfer and implement health research into practice to influence everyday decisions (Knowledge Translation/Adoption of innovation).
Guillermina is the Director of the Health Design Network; a platform to enable health design professionals to exchange knowledge. The Network is an initiative supported by the International Institute for Information Design (IIID), with headquarters in Austria.
Guillermina believes the value of design is neither just in the methodology, nor just in the making of tools, but also in helping teams deal with uncertainty. Uncertainty helps us to actively seek understanding, to keep on grasping how things fit together, and where is the potential to help people.
Guillermina sees the design process as a continuing learning process. In design we iterate understanding so that our perceptions of reality change. One of the things that design fosters is mutual learning in groups of people. She believes that in design we learn about the world through action and through action we change it.
