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.