In dowtown Recife.

And in Óscar Freire, São Paulo (Havaianas store by Isay Weinfeld).

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.

However, they emphasise Recife’s strong visual culture traditions have made the city’s graphic design scene one of the most productive and original in Brazil, allied with other forces such as cinema and music. The most famous of these local cultural expressions was the 1990s mangue beat movement, headed by the late Chico Science and that spread from the streets of Olinda to São Paulo to the rest of the world – Science’s memorial opened earlier this year just across the square from the design centre.

Recife is now also a centre for software and game design and development, mainly anchored in the Porto Digital complex and the CESAR advanced studies centre that started in the Federal University of Pernambuco.

The centre has been promoting workshops, talks, exhibitions and other events for the past years, and since it has its own address for a few months now (it’s the building behind Renata and Cecília) they want to make it part of a wider network of similar spaces.

When I arrived in town I just missed Rico Lins‘ 5-day poster workshop, but I managed to see the results at the centre’s gallery. Downstairs there is also a shop where the centre will soon be selling products from local designers and manufacturers.

By producing and exchanging exhibitions and activities with other like-minded teams and institutions around the world – with a stronger emphasis on Brazil and Latin America – they wish to put Recife on a larger map of design.

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.Again, continuity is key: their project in Cabo de Santo Agostinho with a community of potters started in 2003, and Ana Maria estimates they should be working with them for at least one-and-a-half to two years. Imaginário’s main goal with each project is not only to experiment with new methodologies (after all, they are an education/research institution) but also to help communities to achieve a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency and improve their overall quality of life.

Another innovative side to Imaginário is their client-based work, which they use to balance their working budget – making them less reliant on the university’s finances – but also to employ their know-how and research in designs for local industries. In a state with little industrial production, product design is a remarkably restricted discipline. So their work with low-tech industries such as the CIV glassmaker to better design, manufacture and sell inexpensive houseware goods is quite outstanding.

Lately, Imaginário dropped the word Pernambucano from its name, aiming at a larger client base and to work in projects that go beyond its home state. Their work has also been widely presented in congresses and academic publications in Brazil and abroad, making their modus operandi an inspiration for many other educators, law makers, entrepreneurs and designers.

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.