Day 3 in Curitiba didn’t allow for much sightseeing – I did most of it on endless bus rides around town on Sunday – but was particularly productive when it comes to interviews, today with two of the city’s most prolific design thinkers.

I first met Fernando Galdino, who introduced me to the guys from Boana Estudio. Fernando is a true instigator of the local – and local in his terms goes a long way further than Curitiba’s comprehensive public transport network – design community. An industrial design graduate, “N Design” veteran and tireless blogger, Fernando is a real database of design institutions, references and resources. Currently designing professional laundry systems for a local manufacturer (quite a topical subject, on a day I was actually looking for a laundromat) where he applies ethnographic-based research to his work, Fernando is engaged in the design profession much beyond his day-to-day activities. Over lunch he kept on providing me names of people I should get in touch with and talk to. Better still, he actually contacted some of them for me before and after I went back to the bus tube. Valeu Fernando!

One of the people he mentioned and I quickly got in touch with was Kleber Puchaski. Kleber is the world’s only designer with a PhD in Vehicle Design from the Royal College of Arts in London – where he didn’t design vehicles, but rather the way they’re designed, even thought about. With also an MA in Design and Branding Strategy from Brunel University, he spent 5 years in the UK before coming back to Curitiba last year. He now runs his design research consultancy called Feel the Future, based on the methodology developed for his thesis, working for clients as varied as a multinational bank or a non-profit software developer. Kleber is also one of the founders of Global Design Research, a world-wide design research alliance with members in places such as Tokyo, California, New Delhi and Copenhagen. Despite travelling extensive for work around and outside Brazil, Kleber chose to come back to Curitiba for its access to culture, infrastructure, quality of living and value for money. As we moved from Joker’s Cafe to Beto Batata (two Curitiba institutions), Kleber told me next month he’ll start a position at the Federal University of Paraná as the head of the its Innovation Agency, which will connect academic expertise and research with industrial investment.

Curitiba may still feel like a small town, despite its almost 2 million inhabitants and constant growth in population, traffic and economic influence. But if Fernando and Kleber – much like former mayor Jaime Lerner – are anything to go by, we can rest assured its designers will keep on thinking big.