Renata Gamelo (left), Cecília Pessoa (right) and Flávia Lira (who unfortunately left before we came down to São Pedro Square for the photo) are the tireless women who run the Recife Design Centre.

The first thing they point out in conversation is that their work is not tying local designers with manufacturers, or promote design next to entrepreneurs and the local economy. For that there’s the Pernambuco Design Center, which is part of Sebrae (Brazil’s Federal Agency for the support of small and medium companies) and does just that on a state-wide level.

Their centre belongs to Recife’s municipal culture department and promotes design as a cultural activity. It may seem at first that in a place with almost no industry, the industry of culture is all it’s left for design.

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Ana Maria Queiroz de Andrade and Virgínia Pereira Cavalcanti are professors at the Federal University of Pernambuco and the founders of the Imaginário Pernambucano project. But that’s only the start. The project began in 2000 with the creation of the University’s Benfica Cultural Centre, aimed at strengthening ties between academia and society.

Since then, they have been promoting community initiatives that, stemming from folk art, work with and develop communities around the state of Pernambuco, of which Recife is the capital. If in terms of community design/craft development Imaginário’s projects may not seem to offer anything substantially new, it’s when we look at the wider scope of their action that we realise craft is only the start. Whenever they start a new project, Imaginário’s team gathers other university professors and students from areas such as engineering, planning and social sciences to tackle the community’s needs from as many angles as possible, in an integrated, sustainable way. (more…)

Shortly after I arrived in Recife, Patrícia Amorim and her boyfriend Raul Aguiar took me to Olinda for lunch and for the view. Patrícia is the main reason I actually came here: she wrote me an email on the day I left Lisbon for São Paulo, where she said she has been writing on design for newspapers and magazines here in Pernambuco, wrote her master dissertation on how design has been featured in 5 years of the Veja magazine, helped out Adélia Borges on her curation for the “Fronteiras: Design Brasileiro Hoje” exhibition and – if all that wasn’t enough – is thinking on applying for the D-Crit programme. I immediately considered adding Recife to my itinerary just to talk to her and learn more about all the things she mentioned.

And it was totally worth it. Patrícia and Raul (who runs a design and illustration studio with his brother) not only welcomed me into their flat, but were great guides around Recife. They’re both quite well connected in the city, and Patrícia managed to arrange the two meetings/interviews that later took place – and also walks around the centre and Olinda, a beach break at Praia da Boa Viagem (where I managed to avoid the sharks) and plenty of great local food and drinks.