Manuela is an experienced and award-winning designer with a Ph.D. in System Oriented Design from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). She joins us from her role as Systemic Design Director at Designit Oslo and Associate Professor in Service Design at AHO, and will lead the development of our Oslo office as the Design Director of Fabric+.

She has extensive experience in designing health services and systems, including working as a designer at the renowned Mayo Clinic in their Center for Innovation (CFI) in Rochester, Minnesota. There, she worked as an integrated part of their clinical team, designing new methods and processes alongside healthcare professionals, patients, and hospital management.

Manuela holds a bachelor's degree in integrated design from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and a master's degree from AHO. Her master's thesis, Designing for Dignity, won the Young Design Talent Award issued by the former Norwegian Design Council (now DOGA). The thesis is currently exhibited at the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Museum as part of the Designing for Peace exhibition. It focused on using system-oriented design to meet the needs of survivors of sexual violence by collaborating with, among others, the emergency room in Oslo and the Oslo police.

Her Ph.D. research focused on applying systemic design methods to support public sector employees to better "co-design" and prototype services with citizens and other organizations. She conducted practice-based case studies in Canada with the social design group InWithForward and with Chile's first public innovation lab: Laboratorio de Gobierno.

In 2018, she was recognized by the Systemic Design Association (SDA) as one of the world’s top ten in Systemic Design - and in 2023’s SDA General Assembly, she was elected Board Member. She is a founding member of SDA Norway.