This is a CTP of initiative: DESIS - DESIS Lab Florianópolis (Brazil)
Before 2010, the NAS DESIGN had been working with people from farming families. At 2010 the laboratory established a partnership with AMPE, in Alto Vale. AMPE (Association of micro and small enterprises) is an institution that operates in different cities in Brazil. They help entrepreneurs in developing, communicating and selling services and products. The partnership between NAS DESIGN and AMPE came through an entrepreneur who was working with the lab in other project. The interviewee explained how it all happened once the partnership started:
“First we paid a visit to 12 families that worked with local-farming. Facing the farming families’ income demands, the female of every family usually has a second activity and, in general, this activity is linked to food production (cookies, pastry, etc). Condisering theses activities, the lab started working on the packaging and the visual identity at first, and then we moved on to food quality checks. There was a wide range of products, from biscuits to rum".
AMPE used to say that the work the Lab promoted was one of awareness, because those families were not regulated and did not see the value of being part of AMPE, for example. Although after the NAS DESIGN Lab had worked with them, they realized that they needed to have a systematized production, a communication strategy and a good product to sell; so they started to come to AMPE for help for formalizing their businesses. At the same time, the families continued to develop projects with the NAS DESIGN Lab in a continuous partnership.
This was a turning point for the lab because it expanded the number of projects and engaged the lab in a new logic and new methodological process.
The partnership came about because of a combination of many factors:
1 - The lab coordinator often visited the Alto Vale region because his wife was working at a nearby university.
2- An entrepreneur who had previously worked with the lab saw opportunities for the NAS DESIGN Lab in Alto Vale and made a connection between the community and the lab, and afterwards, with AMPE.
Actively, the lab engagement greatly depended on a collective effort. Alto Vale is more than 200 km away from Florianopolis, where the NAS DESIGN Lab is headquartered, and the project had no funding. Nevertheless, the transportation costs were always met as the coordinator and other teachers helped the students with the transportation costs and after some time, AMPE managed to contribute with a stipend (even though they never paid for the project), which covered logistical expenses.
2008 - The Lab coordinator joined UFRJ DESIS Lab - The Lab coordinator joined the Brazilian research group named DESIS which was founded that year and was based in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
2010-2012 - Partnership with Cooperative of Women Producers of Taboa - This partnership between the lab and a community external actor, the Cooperative of Woman Producers of Taboa was important to reiterate the lab´s vocation to develop projects with local communities. The laboratory developed a project with the women which consists on the visual identity´s design for cooperative products.
2010-2014- Partnership with COLIMAR -Cooperative of the women producers of food from Governador Celso Ramos city (Governador Celso Ramos, Brazil). The group developed a project based on visual identity, packaging design and ergonomic recommendations for the women’s work.
2010 - Partnership with AMPE Alto Vale (Association of the Micro and Small Entrepreneurs from the Alto Vale) - NAS DESIGN started a partnership with AMPE.
2011- Partnership with city halls within the Alto Vale do Itajai region in Santa Catarina, Brazil - Intermediated by AMPE, the group started to work with city halls of cities from Alto Vale do Itajai, through the Alto Vale Project. This project was divided into subprojects with local initiatives and aimed for the local entrepreneurship stimulation and productors´articulation within the same region in order to promote local development. The focus was on promoting incremental innovation in production and consumption systems within the region, as well as implementing radical innovation through new local products creation.
The lab team faced some resistance from families that did not understand the design concept and how it could contribute to their business.
In addition to the distrust in the design methodologies used, there was a lot of prejudice towards a service that was not paid for:
"They thought that it could not be good if they did not have to pay".
This only changed after they began to see the real results of the work done by the NAS DESIGN lab:
"After we delivered the first packages, the first logos and did the first quality tests and offered alternatives to improve the products´quality, they realized that we were working seriously and that we were promoting results".
There is a national institution in Brazil that also serves communities with entrepreneurship methodologies (SEBRAE - Service to support micro and small companies) and there is an adversarial relationship between this institution and the laboratory because the NAS DESIGN LaB also develops some entrepreneurial projects. Even if the methodologies are different and the projects have different perspectives, SEBRAE views the NAS DESIGN Lab as a competitor. In Alto Vale the lab suffered with bad publicity that had been spread by SEBRAE.
The interviewee said that they even tried to develop a partnership with SEBRAE to better attend the families, but they declined the partnership claiming that they had no money to invest in such projects. Therefore, there was a conflict because they were publicly criticizing the work of the laboratory and when a partnership was proposed, they did not accepted it.
The municipal politicians were also a group that was troubled by the laboratory’s presence in the Alto Vale community. They thought that the lab was being financed by a political party, which it was not, but the fact that the lab was working for the families for free was a problem:
“People did not understand that the exchange the laboratory had with the families was not financial. SEBRAE and councilors or other politicians did not understand that our research interests and practical work opportunities were the only things we wanted as exchange for our work. They thought it needed to involve some financial resources and in fact, we did not want that”.
During the moment that the partnership with AMPE in Vale Alto was made, it was not perceived as a critical turning point. It was an organic partnership, made by people who were close to the lab and through the personal circumstances of the lab coordinator. The lab crew did not perceive what it would mean to the laboratory as a whole.
In fact, the processes remained the same, what had changed was the effort being made to go to another city, moving students and maintaining a strong relationships with the communities that were being served in the Alto Vale region. The increasing volume of projects was a consequence of this involvement with AMPE and the community, adding to the results that were brought back to the community. This kind of partnership, taking into consideration that the two cities are far away from one another, required a strong commitment from the lab´s team. This was not accomplished immediately, they did not foresee the magnitude that the project would conquer:
“We went to carry out a specific project with 12 families and suddenly the laboratory was in a partnership with a large cooperative. It was a positive surprise for the lab, but at the same time I knew it would be a great challenge. Now that we were systematizing our operations, we could deeply understand the whole process of what happened, but at that time everything was very organic and was happening naturally".
The interviewee considers that this partnership promoted a more professional application of design for the lab staff:
"We already had some work done with communities (in the cities of Governador Celso Ramos and Guarda do Embau), but in Alto Vale it was different, we worked with more people, with different challenges. Also the expansion was interesting; we got recognition in a region that is far from our headquarters".
Other than that, it was important to understand how to have a dialogue with the community:
"We felt like they did not understand what we were talking about, so we had to translate the 'design language' to a language they would understand. It was a new knowledge construction (of this new 'language') that helped us a lot then and we have adopted that knowledge with all our projects since".
The necessity of creating practical, participatory and engaged environments for the community and the students made the laboratory develop activities that are held in every project since this partnership occurred, for example a seminar for the community:
"We always engage in open seminar, explaining the creative process and integrating politicians, organizations, associations and everybody who wants to know about the project in order to avoid misplaced information or bad publicity".
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