Why I became a transdisciplinary design researcher

So why I became a transdisciplinary design researcher. So this is going to be a very short summary of more than 20 years of working towards that field. At the beginning I didn't know that I wanted to be in that field. And I don't even think that I'm that field almost at the time. That's why I say that I'm a transdisciplinary, means that I'm in transition all the time from one discipline to the other as I'm in movement. I'm moving from one to the other. And first a disclaimer. Presented in this f

ollowing linear format, this narrative does not account for all the moments of despair, frustration, sorrow, and feeling lost in my career. I underplay them here to paint a positive big picture in the spirit of being immersed in the US culture. All right, so this sarcasm is important, but it's true I want to have a short presentation and I can for sure talk about frustration, sorry I'm feeling lost, but not on record. All right. You can ask me later about this. But let me start with my childhood

times. Of course I knew right away that I wanted to be a design researcher like Gyro Gearloose, or Professor Pardal in Portuguese. He was not called a professor in the US. Yet was not known as professor there, but in Brazil he was. That's funny, right? So I was already wanting to become a professor when I was a kid, and that's a true story. But I still keep asking why this Disney character became so important, inspiring for my childhood times. I don't know much about it. I started to reflect on

this while building up this presentation. But anyhow, I figured out two things. Well, I grew up close to Rocinha, or Rocinha, the biggest informal settlement in Latin America and one of the biggest in the world. I live just close to that big mountain on the right side. In the middle of the jungle, but it's still close to Rocinha. And I always was passing by and being amazed by the cheerful vibrations that came from that. I mean, it seemed lively. It didn't seem like the buildings on your back.

That seems like more abandoned society or civilization. This is striving. But on the other hand, I also knew people and I went through and saw things that were very scary, like people holding big guns and actually listening to shooting and to the stories of people that had been killed by those shootings. Anyway, it was scary, but also inspiring, and especially by the improvisation style that contrasted with this big modern development that you see on the back. Later on, I moved to Curitiba. I wa

s still a kid. And it's a completely different city in southern Brazil. It is considered by some Curitibanos as the Europe of Brazil. They really feel superior in relation to the rest of the country. That's really up to the point that they started to call Curitiba as a republic of Curitiba. And they have this famous judge or now infamous judge, Sergio Moro, to imprison the former president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the time, now current president of Brazil. And that's one of the ma

jor political upheavals and changes in the last few years. So Lula went, was transformed into a corrupt politician, by this city, but also later on he managed to underplay the role Curitiba played in major Brazilian politics. And then he became now the saviour of Brazil from Bolsonaro. Anyway, Curitiba has this ethos of being a modern, urban planned city. And I'd have to grow up in those two cities and having been back and forth with this city for a long time. I'd have to grow up in those two ci

ties and have been back and forth with this postmodern and modern, or whatever, outer modern, if you wanna call, what Rio de Janeiro is. That's really an animating part of my story. And that's probably one of the reasons why I was interested on invention and design. I ended up not following an industrial design bachelor. I chose social communication because I thought that everything I was reading and seeing from, coming from industrial design students was not political enough. I really wanted to

change those fundamental and unequal structures that I was seeing in those cities. And of course, in Rio is more explicit, but in Curitiba, there is also the same kind of unequal structure going on, just more hidden. And I got in love with writing and also formatting that writing in an appealing way. So I started to play around with newspapers. We published this Olenador, that means the lumberjack man. So we were really denouncing all kinds of things that we found weird or unethical in our univ

ersity. And selling that newspaper to all the students so that students could have interesting arguments against faculty members, when kind of discussion. Yeah, we were really trying to instill critical thinking in our university environment. But while doing this, I somehow lost a bit of interest on journalism, which was my major. And I started to focus on graphic design. So I started moving slowly from media studies, that's how the equivalent of social communication here in US. And I combined t

hose two experiences while writing a web blog on web design. That's called Usabilidoido. And I have been writing this thing for more than 20 years now. More than 1,000 posts has been published there. It's all in Portuguese. I also have a website in English that has way less content than that, but it's based on that same experience. It's less personal. It's more focused on my academic life. This one has a lot of personal things. Anyway, this website has changed a lot since I started, but I wanted

to really show how the very first layout. I don't know, I was really young. At that time, I was still finishing my undergrad studies and I was doing an internship in an advertising agency. And I designed this website using Flash, Flash is an animation software, interactive animation software that was really, really cool during those times. And I ended up winning an award from an international competition that was so weird. I didn't have to pay for the entrance fee because this conference was or

ganized in the global south. Later, much later on, I understood this. It was held in South Africa and I knew that people all around the world, especially in need of recognition, might apply. And yeah, so they sent me this nice, I couldn't attend the ceremony, but they sent me the trophy. I'm gonna show you quickly this website for your fun, because the context of it, I don't wanna go too much into the details. It's very important. I was becoming a dad at the age of 20 and I was excited about it,

but at the same time, frightening. And I had opportunity to convince my boss that his website for his advertising agency should have a baby on it. And then, so I did, and look at how it works. This is the menu for navigating the website and you drag and drop the options, things that you would never do right now. And there is even music, right? The website with music, wow. These were good times. Oh my gosh, this is really a lot of nostalgic feelings. (upbeat music) Every time you click one of th

ese icons, you see the experience of the ad agents with that kind of media. So now we see the experience of DC2 with radio, that you could listen to their jingles. And the logos that they design, of course they have grassy design services too. And it's interactive, look, you can really look at the details of it. - This reminds me of when I was learning computer, when I was in first grade. Yeah, but I mean, we were all learning computers at those times, right? This was the beginning of the 200s a

nd 2000s and then we didn't know so much what computers could be like. But that's my favorite part of this website. What is this? What is for? - Water. - What do you think? - Water. - Water? - Balloon. - Balloon? - Can't tell you, maybe. - It says, pull the cord, pull the cord, pull the cord. All right, you pull the cord. (whistling) Oh my gosh, that's music. That's Beethoven's Für Elise. My brother was all the time playing that song when I was a kid and annoying me like hell. Because he had one

of these toys with his music and I destroyed a toy. But then that music never stopped in my head since then. That's why I put it here. All right, so after I started making websites like this, I really loved the media. It really became more interesting to me than newspapers. And I started digging into the topic of web design. There were very few courses that were connected to that in my university, but the library had a lot of books. And I already mentioned to you this, that I read a lot of book

s there and they were like key to getting settled in that area for a while. So here's how my trajectory started to expand beyond the major topics, the topic of my major. So I started to take classes in information management and also in anthropology. And why anthropology? Because I understood that this media was all about how people interact and how people understand things and how people develop and transform themselves. So I had this hunch that it was all about becoming human. But I couldn't f

ully articulate and anthropology was somehow helping me with that. Anthropology had even the first concept of interface that I learned. They used the concept of interface to talk about a space where the sacred meets the profane and everything can happen. It's weird, right? But think about when a king comes to the people, to address the people in a discourse. That's an interface where the powerful meets the powerless and anything can happen. For example, people can throw tomatoes on the king and

then destroy a little bit, it's sacredness, thanks. Well, I soon became very concerned about that technology and I took a master degree in technology and society. That was the only program that dealt with web design or something close to that in my city. It was a very important moment in my life too, a lot of seminars, that's where I learned how to do seminars. We are not doing a seminar in this picture. We are organizing a seminar, actually. We are all grad students, crazy ones. I go to old tim

es. A lot of reading too. I think I read about 40 books a year those two years. A lot of stuff. And everything I learned there, I felt like I wanted to put in practice. The grad study was really the humanities side, so I could not build things and make stuff, but I managed to create my own grad program with other people like-minded. It was called Faber Ludens Institute. It had more than just grad study. We also had research facilities and consultancy all together combined. And we played around w

ith digital technologies and tried to develop a design approach to that. This was the beginnings of a new field core called, right now, interaction design. And it was loads of fun, really, really interesting. I can tell so many stories about this. But the best part of that story was probably becoming really fully conscious that design and education was about becoming human. And that's the background story of the name of the institute. It's called Faber Ludens because it's our vision of what is i

t to be human. It's to make your reality and also to play with that reality. Faber means fabricating in Latin and Ludens means playing around. So we are not really thinking that human, our conception of human being is not about this rational sapience. It's much more about this playful maker. And we wanted to train people to become human like that. So we did it. And we also reflected that, at some point, this was a privilege of those who could follow that course. So we wanted to free design from

designers. Not just for designers, I mean, people that are not trained or they don't have access to training, they are also already doing it. They are already becoming human by playing and making their own way. And then we wrote a book called Design Livre. It has also Spanish translation, Diseño Libre, and it's a very political pamphlet that you can read in two hours or less. And it's all about how design must be free from designers. We also built a digital platform to implement that vision. It

was a critical alternative to open IDO digital platform that was big at those times. And we also were like the Global South Alternative because we used non-English language. And we offered a lot of digital tools that matched and even overcame the capacities of Google Drive at those times. We competed with Google Drive and we won in many features. We were fast, we were cutting edge, but this was more than 10 years ago. Anyway, this was an open source software and a lot of people participating to

it. Later on, we compiled a book with our learnings. It's called Coralizando. Again, like Design Livre, this was a collective written book we wrote in an entire week with several people writing everything at the same time using this real-time text editing feature. It was not using Google Docs, we used our own. We had our own, it was called Eitherpad. We still have this platform running on, but it's a bit outdated. Anyways, for my trajectory, that mean a big expansion because I moved away from gr

aphic design, got less interested on the graphic aspects of it, but on the structural side, I was more interested. For example, how do you build such a platform that would sustain for so many years? How can you build a platform that is still up after 13 years and there's not a single source of funding? How can you do that? Only with open source software and also with cooperative digital server. Well, all of these things I started learning from other fields like computer science. I got back to in

formation management anyways. Now there's a short list of publications from this period, some selected ones. I say on this period, not off this period because at that moment I wasn't writing the articles and scientific articles. I was actually making a lot of stuff, but since I started to have other people involved and those people took a hard time to understand what was going on, I started to write because writing was the best way to get someone on board on the same page and having them a meani

ngful conversation or really a practical collaboration in one of these projects. So I started write, write, write, write about these experiences, publish that so that I would also be able to access more funding. In my PhD at the University of Twente, I learned to do design research as a series of consecutive experiments. That means professionalizing design research, doing it more systematically. And I got back to graphic design because at some point I realized I needed to design board games as a

part of my experiments. And I designed a hospital design game and you had to compete with other players. You would play either as an engineer, an architect or a facility manager or a nurse or even hospital director. And each of you would have different political agenda in the game. And those were most skillful into collaborating with vested interests, meaning, no, let's do this for the common good. But while saying that, you would actually make sure that you would earn more money than other pla

yers. That contradiction was really the key part of playing the game. And it was also a major scientific discovery that I made available into a more public accessible format. I played this game even with Dutch kids. And even if I could not say much in Dutch, they understood that this was really a real challenge. How can you manage personal interests versus collective interests? And in a capitalist economy, this is really at the heart of most of our conflicts of interests. Well, in the Netherland

s, the best thing I learned probably was how to streamline the design research activity as a kind of a factory you like or a kind of a production, a productive process. So I learned how to fund, execute, analyze and publish research, what you see in the picture is the first journal paper published that I got in my hands. And it was really hard to get there, it took me two years. But after that, many doors opened for me. I'm not gonna tell all of them right now, but it's really a major breakthrou

gh because I'm making sure that my career milestones are public once I publish and that others can hinge upon to the same milestone if they wanna follow a similar path. For example, if you wanna design a board game about the hospital design, you will probably want to see everything that I have done before so that you can profit from that experience and design a better game. Or you wanna maybe design a game in another field that also stimulate that kind of conflict between personal and collective

interests. Anyway, my PhD was really an expansion towards many different areas that were really far away like construction management, architecture. But I landed in on service design, which was the field in design that could somehow enable that dialogue productively. I currently focus a lot on my efforts on service design. You will see that I will come back and forth from that field, but I cannot really tell that I'm just a service designer or my field of researches in service design. I prefer

to keep flowing through these many fields. Those that are in a subdued color, light color, they are fields that I haven't been that active during that period, but they might light up later on. We conducted a various such experience while I was teaching digital design at the Catholic University of Parana, PUC PR. Was assistant professor, my first academic full-time position. And they gave me a lot of freedom to try out things on teaching and students. That was when I started doing theater of the

press. And you see one of these pictures of using theater of the press to understand and criticize Instagram. So what you see in that picture is students figuring out the traps of Instagram in a time where the critical discourse, public critical discourse on Instagram was not that widespread like it is right now. So you can see with these masks that they are really talking about these identities that people produce for others that create this kind of conflict between who they really think they a

re. Also another important job I took there was to reboot the University Innovation Agency, Hot Milk. And we did a lot of stuff with startups there. We created, used co-design processes. So it become really energized community. We took a lot of projects based on that innovation agency, but the best one was probably this electricity sector digital platform for open innovation. That means engaging startups with producing and distributing energy in the state of Parana. There was some graphic design

assignments as part of this project, for example, organizing and producing those animations that would explain the challenges that the legislation we're facing. I think I spoke a little bit about this project in my previous guest lecture on the expensive characters of games that we played a lot of games in this project. Anyway, this was about $1 million budget was really a big project. I managed more than 10 people in this project, but I had to quit that job for some political reasons that I wo

n't go into the details right now, but I can laugh afterwards. Anyway, in parallel to that, I was also working for the Apple funded developer training program, and I managed to instill design as part of the curriculum, and also to create the transdisciplinary role of diviner. Diviner is a mix between developer and designer, is a person who can code as good as can lay out things on a graphic design project. It was really interesting experiment. I missed being in that environment, especially becau

se Apple itself has already a lot of critical pedagogy built into it. They had to use a method called challenge-based learning, and it's definitely one of the most student autonomy enforcing pedagogies that I've seen so far. So it seems like it's getting confusing, right? Yeah, that was me at those times, and I'm still getting even more confused than that. So I was studying education, theater, software engineering, open innovation, all fields that were quite far from my initial trajectory. Anywa

ys, we published quite some papers about this, but I guess the moment where I really found myself was probably in my last job, at the Federal University of Technology, UTFPR, similar to UFPR, but it's a different institution. And once I just started there, Bolsonaro came to power and he cut all the budgets for research and teaching, and they almost shut down the new public universities. So I had to really discuss this with our students. Students, some of them were in favor of Bolsonaro, others w

ere against Bolsonaro, and we wanted to have a conversation about this, but I designed the conversation. So we designed many things together, but what I'm showing here was probably the most striking projects, a wearable manifesto on politicizing design, even for a right-wing perspective, but also from a left-wing perspective. So politicizing for us meant having a democratic discussion of what design is and what design could be. And I realized through that experiment that I needed to include my o

wn existential condition, for example, acknowledging myself as a, at the last, at least in Brazil, as a white man, privileged, hetero, cis, and all kinds of privileged stuff, but also accounting for that privilege and making what is right to do once you become conscious of that, which means sharing that privilege and hacking it, and sharing privilege is what became also a method of doing design research at those point. And let me share how we start doing this collectively. About that same time,

Bolsonaro supporters were raiding publicly against Paulo Freire. Remember that guy I mentioned to you before? Yeah, Paulo Freire is a Brazilian educator. He developed this critical pedagogy approach where students have more autonomy and they develop critical thinking, but they also become more politically minded. They understand more about injustice in society and contradictions of it. So that bothers people who wants to keep the status quo, who are usually the Bolsonaro supporters. People who a

re like, they are middle-class, mostly middle-class people that already have a battle off. They don't, they have free time to go to these demonstrations anyway. And what happens that, since they start attacking Paulo Freire, a lot of people got interested in reading his works, not just in Brazil, but even outside of Brazil. His works have been translated into many languages. He's probably one of the, he's definitely the most known Brazilian scholar of all times. He has more than 400,000 citation

s in Google Scholar, and that's more than four times what Albert Einstein has. And if you haven't heard about Paulo Freire, you have heard about Albert Einstein, it's because he comes from the global South and not letting him become known is also of interest for those in the global North, right? Anyway, his ideas are dangerous to the ruling class and the Bolsonaro supporters. So by that time, there was also another issue that hit him really hard. Bolsonaro was mismanaging really hard the pandemi

cs. And he said, "No, there's no need for worry about, don't need to wear a mask or stay at home. You can just use this medicine called chloroquine." And because of this, it wasn't proven, the doctor said this doesn't work, and 17,000 people died because of using this medicine. 17,000 people, in total was more than 700,000 people that died because of COVID. And the analysts say that half of it could have been saved, at least some 350,000 lives could have been saved if Bolsonaro had managed bette

r the health ministry and the public health system. It's all on the government in Brazil. It's not so much about private companies like it is here. Anyway, one of my colleagues, Marco Masarotto, in this situation that we have to work remotely, he proposed to study Paulo Freire and the relationship between his work and design. And that became the foundations for the Design and Oppression Network. The people that we met in this reading group online became the founders of it. The Design and Oppress

ion Network also had its own reading group for more than two years. We had more than 600 people participating of these discussions. We also run a lot of design experience, like doing theater of the press online using these body models, these 3D body models. It's really exciting times, but also worrying times with all the things that was going on outside of our homes. We also founded the Laboratory of Design Against Oppression, LADO, as the local hub of this network in UTFPR, what I was teaching.

LADO grew up in many different ways. This is still going on now there, after I left. LADO is a space for outreach in our university. It became an official outreach project that means connection with community and doing things for the benefit of the community, not just for the benefit of the students or the university. And we run a lot of experiments there, especially theater of the press experience to learn about the embodied aspect of doing design. What we are doing right now in this picture i

s understanding how a design worker gets a lot of pressure from their bosses and for society and how they can get around that. We also designed our way out of oppression, of liberating projects. For example, this modular set of furniture for people to reuse those materials and not throw out in the garbage. So you could have a more dynamic lifestyle too. They even designed a furniture printer, or actually a furniture cutter, the CNC machine that was made with the modules that they designed for th

at same furniture. It's a very interesting example of a meta-design project, but also design delivery or open design. But the most important discovery that we made at LADO, also with some researchers that I started to collaborate at the previous institution, Catholic University, it was the discovery of the user oppression, or also known as userism, which means reducing people and their full experience and their bodily existence as an abstract understanding of a person, which is the user. And we

are living in times where user oppression is so strong that nowadays users are merely artificial intelligence agents that are producing some random data for designers to design and ground and justify their designs with some fake representations of people, some very weird representations. So you could come up there and say, if I need to do a design research, I just press a button and it generates automatically for me, that's totally lame, but that's the same what SharpTPT does for other areas. An

d that's something we need to have to fight because if a lot of products and services start to get designed in this way, wait for it. You will suffer a lot. We will suffer a lot. Anyway, this is the last field I went through while in my transdisciplinary career is industrial design, really learning about designing physical objects that I learned with my students because I didn't have studied that before. And yeah, it's growing, it's still growing. I don't know where I will go, where I will head

towards nowadays. I think I gave you a glimpse a little bit once I show you this book that I'm reading now, "Phenomenology of the Spirit" by Georg Hegel. Probably I'll move towards developing this concept of design consciousness that will expand the concept of design thinking. But that's a philosophical trajectory that might take a lot of years to complete or even to get something productive. By now, I just wanted to say that this story is to be continued and I hope you are part of it. Please, j

oin my trajectory.