Product Design (UX/UI) · Product Management · Innovation Strategy · AI and Design Research
Working at the intersection of design, research, strategy and AI — to build things people actually need.
Hello, I'm Amanda.
A designer and doctoral researcher based in Lisbon, working at the intersection of design, technology and equity.
Nine years building my practice across innovation centers, startups, research institutions, tech companies and consultancies. Seven in Brazil, two in Portugal.
My PhD investigates how generative AI and feminist foresight can reshape innovation ecosystems. Not as abstract theory, but as real tools for changing who gets to participate in innovation, and on what terms.
Design, to me, is less about screens and more about the conditions that make innovation possible. And who gets to shape them.
Understanding how people and generative AI shape each other.
Turning insight into direction.
Creating intuitive, accessible experiences.
Turning group thinking into shared decisions.
Skills
[Experience timeline — content pending. Structure ready for roles, organizations and highlights.]
MC Sonae · Innovation Strategy
Corporate innovation program connecting retail scale with startup experimentation.
da.tes · UX/UI Design
Fintech matchmaking platform — end-to-end research and product design.
Diversicuida · UX Research
Health platform co-designed with LBT women and healthcare providers, born from academic research.
GUIAR · UX/UI Design
Data-driven platform helping social investment managers and entrepreneurs track and report impact.
M.I.N.As · Innovation Strategy
Federally-funded gender equity program spanning education, entrepreneurship and social infrastructure in a major tech district.
Confidential Banking Client
A confidential engagement gamifying mobile app experience to increase engagement among users aged 18–25.
AI didn't replace the way I work. It just gave it more room to move. This is where I keep the experiments, the half-finished ideas, and the tools I'm still learning to use well. Some of it ships. Some of it just teaches me something worth remembering.
I'm still learning where the edges of this workflow are. It usually starts before any tool opens: looking at references, other people's work, competitor benchmarks, things with nothing to do with the project that somehow end up shaping it anyway. Claude and Cursor help me think through structure, not just generate code. Figma's MCP integration lets me build and update a real design system instead of a static file nobody opens again. Vercel makes shipping feel less precious: if something's wrong, I fix it and push again. What I like most is how much closer an idea gets to something real, and how much sooner I find out if it actually works.
Research & Publications
Academic research and practice-based workshops exploring generative AI, feminist foresight, and equitable innovation ecosystems.
View PublicationsFFIE — Feminist Futures in Innovation Ecosystems
PhD in Design — Generative AI & Feminist Foresight
IADE, Universidade Europeia, Lisbon
The FFIE Framework is an original participatory foresight methodology developed as part of a doctoral investigation in Design at IADE, Universidade Europeia Lisboa. It was designed to support stakeholders in co-creating gender-equitable strategies and speculative artifacts within AI-driven innovation ecosystems, grounding futures imagination in feminist, intersectional, and decolonial epistemological commitments.
Audience
Innovation professionals, researchers, designers, policymakers, and organizations committed to advancing gender equity in technology and AI development contexts.
Purpose
To translate empirically grounded structural tensions into participatory workshop experiences that move beyond diagnosis toward the active co-creation of preferred feminist futures, making visible the power dynamics embedded in AI systems and enabling participants to imagine, design, and politically evaluate alternatives.
Validation
The FFIE Framework was validated through two participatory workshops conducted in Recife, Brazil, and Lisbon, Portugal, with twenty-four participants drawn from innovation ecosystems in both countries. Participants were recruited through deliberate intersectional criteria, ensuring the inclusion of structurally diverse professional positions across gender, race, professional role, and organizational context. Two trial sessions preceded the main workshops, informing iterative refinements to facilitation design, instruction sequencing, and activity transitions. Post-workshop feedback was collected through a structured instrument covering methodological clarity, relevance, creative engagement, and transformative potential, yielding a mean rating of 4.65 out of 5, with no score below 4. Qualitative feedback corroborated the quantitative signal with specific and critical observations, confirming the framework's analytical efficacy and its capacity to produce politically legible speculative outputs grounded in empirical structural diagnosis.
Why Feminist Design Matters for Generative AI: Perspectives from Lusophone Innovation Ecosystems2026
Oliveira, A.L., Hernandez-Ramirez, R., Ayanoglu, H.
International Conference on Gender Research (ICGR) 2026 · Gdańsk University of Technology
View DOI ↗Speculative Design for Workplace Futures: Fictional Personas and Narratives Assisted by Generative AI2025
Oliveira, A.L., Hernandez-Ramirez, R., Ayanoglu, H.
Senses & Sensibility'25 — 13th International Conference
UpcomingAI and Gender Perspectives in Startup Environments: Mitigating Bias, Challenging Stereotypes, and Design Implications2025
Oliveira, A.L., Hernandez-Ramirez, R., Ayanoglu, H.
Human-Computer Interaction — HCII 2025 · Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15772 · Springer, Cham
View DOI ↗Integrating AI into Co-Design Processes to Achieve Gender Equality in the Innovation Ecosystems of Brazil and Portugal: A Literature Review2023
Oliveira, A., Ayanoglu, H., Hernández-Ramírez, R.
Business Sustainability: Innovation in Entrepreneurship & Internationalization — ISPGAYA 2023 · Springer, Cham
View DOI ↗Plataforma "Se Toca, Mana!": o processo de Design na investigação das barreiras no exercício do direito à saúde de mulheres LBT2023
Oliveira, A.L., de Araújo, J.M., Barros, H.O.
Estudos em Design, 31(3)
View DOI ↗Want the deep dive on any project? Full case studies live on each project page — happy to talk through any of them.
amandalopesoliv@gmail.com