A Importância do Design de Comunicação no Processo de Disseminação de Práticas Comunitárias em Bairros Sociais: O Balteiro

Nuno Martins; Daniel Brandão; Leonor Guimarães; Eliana Penedos-Santiago; Emílio Brandão

doi:10.17231/comsoc.43(2023).4455

Authors

Nuno Martins Instituto de Investigação em Design Media e Cultura, Escola Superior de Design, Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave, Barcelos, Portugal https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5228-5453
Daniel Brandão Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6331-0354
Leonor Guimarães Instituto de Investigação em Design, Media e Cultura, Escola Superior de Design, Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave, Barcelos, Portugal https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9324-7093
Eliana Penedos-Santiago Instituto de Investigação em Design Media e Cultura/Unexpected Media Lab, Faculdade de Belas Artes, Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7750-6227
Emílio Brandão School of Architecture and the Built Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden/Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3855-8520

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17231/comsoc.43(2023).4455

Keywords:

communication design, community practices, social housing neighbourhoods, social design, universal design

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate how research in communication design can contribute to disseminating community practices in economically disadvantaged contexts, such as in social housing neighbourhoods. This study stems from the ECHO research project, where the main mission is to understand and document two self-initiated community practices in the social housing neighbourhood of Balteiro, in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal, to disseminate them and foster their replication in similar social contexts. It begins with a literature review on the role of design on behalf of communities, focusing, in particular, on the concepts of social design and universal design, which substantiate the relevance and pertinence of the issue under study. Then, it describes the case study of Balteiro. It presents the methodologies adopted in this research, namely the interviews conducted to learn about the history of the two community practices. This provided the basis for developing a preliminary study for an online platform and a series of documentary films. This study proved the importance of involving designers in this dissemination process through multidisciplinary teams. The research work in the field should be close to the community, the institutions and the different social actors involved to understand the complexity of the study context and define how design should operate. The empirical experience from this study has shown that work in the social area should be developed locally, focused on small communities or informal organisations, and aware that results are achieved slowly and gradually.

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Author Biographies

Nuno Martins, Instituto de Investigação em Design Media e Cultura, Escola Superior de Design, Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave, Barcelos, Portugal

Nuno Martins holds a PhD in digital media (2013) at the University of Porto, having been a PhD fellow of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology’s UT Austin-Portugal Programme; a master’s degree in multimedia art and a degree in communication design at Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. He is adjunct professor at the School of Design of Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave, where he is director and lecturer of the Master in Digital Design, also teaching in the Degree in Graphic Design. He is a full researcher at the Research Institute for Design, Media and Culture. Currently he is the principal investigator of the project ECHO - Echoing the Communal Self: Designing the Dissemination and Replication of Self-initiated Practices in Underprivileged Urban Communities in a Post-pandemic World (EXPL/ART-DAQ/0037/2021) and co-principal investigator of the project HERIC 2D - Health Risk Communication: Design and Digital Communication of Official Public Health Sources to Guide Citizens in Pandemic Situations (2022.06008.PTDC), both funded by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. He is the founder and chair of DIGICOM — International Conference on Design and Digital Communication, he has also co-edited several scientific books on design and integrated scientific committees in numerous international journals and conferences. As a designer, he was awarded several national and international prizes and some of his projects appear in over two dozen books on communication design, published in Hong Kong, Germany, Spain, United States, Austria, Netherlands, France, China and United Kingdom.

Daniel Brandão, Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal

Daniel Brandão holds a PhD in digital media, in the domain of audiovisual and interactive content creation, at the University of Porto (2014), where he developed the project Museum of Ransom (www.museudoresgate.org), a participatory website that collects videos made by citizens about the city’s daily life, aiming at legitimizing their cultural heritage vocation. He also co-coordinated the project Citadocs: creation of collaborative mini-documentaries, born in Future Places Medialab for Citizenship. He holds a degree in communication design (2004) and a master’s degree in multimedia art (2008), both at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. He is assistant professor at the Department of Communication Sciences at Institute of Social Science, University of Minho, and integrated researcher at the Communication and Society Research Centre. He is co-principle investigator of the project bYou: Study on Children and Young People’s Experiences and Expressions of the Media (PTDC/COM-OUT/3004/2020), and integrates the teams of the research projects ECHO: Echoing the Communal Self (EXPL/ART-DAQ/0037/2021) and HERIC 2D: Health Risk Communication (2022.06008.PTDC), all of them funded by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. He is co-chair of DIGICOM (International Conference on Design and Digital Communication), has co-edited several books on design and has participated in several scientific committees of international conferences and journals. With vast teaching experience in public and private universities in the areas of communication design, audiovisual and multimedia, he has worked in Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave, Escola Superior Artística do Porto, College of Art and Design — Matosinhos, Universidade Católica Portuguesa — Braga. He has worked with several institutions in the area of culture, with particular emphasis on the Serralves Foundation, and its Museum of Contemporary Art, with which he collaborated for six years.

Leonor Guimarães, Instituto de Investigação em Design, Media e Cultura, Escola Superior de Design, Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave, Barcelos, Portugal

Leonor Guimarães is a student in the Master’s degree in Digital Design at the Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave and has a degree in fine arts — multimedia (2021) from the University of Porto, where she was a member of the student company FBAUP Design Inc. She was awarded a scholarship in the program Verão com Ciência (IPCA/ESD/ID+/FCT/BIIVC/2022), funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia and is currently interested in the study of interface design and user experience.

Eliana Penedos-Santiago, Instituto de Investigação em Design Media e Cultura/Unexpected Media Lab, Faculdade de Belas Artes, Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal

Eliana Penedos-Santiago is an integrated member of the Instituto de Investigação em Design Media e Cultura, collaborating as a researcher in nationally and internationally funded projects. She is a post-doctoral fellow at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, entitled A Escola de Carlos Ramos - Uma Década de Histórias Invisíveis na ESBAP: 1957 a 67. PhD from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Valencia (2012), she focuses her research in the field of social sciences with emphasis on digital media, local memories, Portuguese design heritage, design education, augmented reality and immersive design through virtual reality. She has coordinated and curated several events, such as seminars, academic workshops, pedagogical projects and exhibitions. She has been a moderator at numerous conferences and scientific forums. Since 2005 she has been a design professor in the 1st and 2nd cycles of studies (design labs, motion graphics, web design and video, history and culture of the web, illustration and digital animation and design for health and wellbeing).

Emílio Brandão, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden/Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

Emílio Brandão is a PhD student at KTH School of Architecture (Stockholm), since September 2022, within the JPI-Urban Europe CoNECT (Collective Networks for Everyday Community Resilience and Ecological Transition) project. His research focuses on community pedagogies for resilience beyond crisis. For the past nine years, he has been a lecturer at Chalmers School of Architecture (Gothenburg) and the director of the master’s programme Architecture and Planning Beyond Sustainability from 2016 to 2022, where he acted as examiner, supervisor, and lecturer in several courses, project subjects and master’s theses. In both research and teaching, he focuses on issues of urban pedagogies for sustainability and social inclusion, community resilience and collaborative practices. He specialises in processes and methodologies of design activism, co-creation, participation and self-construction involving multiple stakeholders. He works in contexts highly challenged by socio-economic segregation, urban poverty, various inequalities and injustices, both locally and internationally, and based on many years of experience in architectural practice and pedagogy in higher education based on action-research and involvement in non-governmental organisations such as Architects Without Borders (both international and Swedish organisation). In 2021, he received the prestigious pedagogy award from Chalmers University of Technology. He has also been involved in different collaborative and research projects, such as the European Social Fund project Lärandets Torg in Hammarkullen, Gothenburg (2014–2017) and the research project “Stitching the City: From Micro-data to Macro-views”.

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