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Created in 1999, Paraná Design Centre is a nonprofit institution based in Curitiba, in the south of Brazil. “Our vocation and direction is to support industries and companies interested in developing innovative and well-designed products; we offer assistance in project conception and management”, explains Geraldo Pougy, its director. Paraná Design Centre is a national reference in design management. As a pioneer, it has been the first Design Centre in Brazil to work towards companies’ needs – a methodology that has demonstrated its efficiency, and resulted in one of the widest support programmes for the development of new products and incentive to innovation ever performed in the country: the Criação Paraná programme.

 

Criação Paraná (Paraná Creation) was a design support programme for industries in Brazil, specifically those in the state of Paraná. This programme started in 2000 and had two editions until 2005. The programmes provided design support in a tailored advice programme for manufacturing industries, taking them from the very initial stage of the design process to the prototype stage. The main objective was to teach small companies how to hire designers and how to manage design projects. It is important to say that this was the first time that most of the participant companies had used design. The result was a collection of products and the programme celebrated this achievement with an exhibition which helped some of the companies to launch or promote their new products. After the exhibition, the Criação Paraná team continued encouraging companies on the design process, providing support for the market launch of their products.

 
The first edition of the Criação Paraná was launched in 2000 and culminated with an exhibition of 41 products from companies based in Paraná, in August 2002. After this first exhibition, an evaluation of results was carried out, which focused on the companies’ expectations, and as a result of these the second phase of Criação Paraná concentrated on commercial production aspects. The evaluation was carried out in several workshops in which eminent professors such as Gui Bonsiepe, Acyr Seleme, Belmiro Valverde and Elói Zanetti took part, as well as international lecturers including Bruce Wood (UK), which took place in August 2004. The goal of the second Criação Paraná was then revised to involve not only companies from Paraná but also from national industries, to develop a set of thirty products up to the prototype stage.

 

Based on the wishes of the companies to have contact with a wide range of visitors, the exhibition of the second edition of Criação Paraná was held in a public space, the Estação Shopping Centre in Curitiba, in 2005. For better visibility, the catalogue incorporated a design magazine with a national circulation as a special supplement.

 

OPERATION

 

The Criação Paraná programme created in 2000 was based on the experiences of the Glasgow Collection, developed successfully in Scotland from 1997 to 1999 with the following goals: to select good ideas in design; minimize bureaucracy; keep an agile approach among all the agents; organize a management team with people experienced in design; and produce a positive attitude.

 

The experience of the two editions helped to improve the methodology for this programme. It can now be described as a programme based on the concept of assisted design, orienting companies interested in developing new products with suitable attention towards design and use of materials. Its motto is “To plan before investing resources”, and the programme assists industries in the identification of new business opportunities, in the search for a designer and in the identification of suppliers. Any problems are discussed during meetings with entrepreneurs, in industry and at the Paraná Design Centre, which also provides advice about registers and patents.

 

Criação Paraná can be described in four main stages:

 

1. IDENTIFY THE DEMAND:

·          plan visits

·          define goals

This is the first stage of the programme when the companies that will participate in the programme are identified. 153 companies were visited for the first edition, and all of the visits are logged. Companies interested in the programme or with a good idea will then contact the Design Centre. The Design Centre team will then identify the programme goals.

 

2. DESIGN MOVEMENT:

·          create a group

·          organize seminars, meetings, workshops

·          exchange information

At this stage, many different events will be organized, including seminars, meetings and workshops based on the needs of the companies. This is important because it makes the companies feel like a product development group. They help each other all the time.

 

3. TO LEARN from the experience:

·          the value of the experience

·          assisted development (Design Centre team support)

This is the most important stage of the programme. It is about learning through experience. The good thing is that the businessmen have the support of the Design Centre team during the project; this is what we call assisted development.

 

4. VISIBILITY:

·          public exhibition of the prototypes and the development processes

·          catalogue (contains contact details of the companies involved)

·          special cases

Visibility works as a goal for the companies. At the end of the programme a public exhibition is organized, which shows all the prototypes and the steps the company took to arrive there. A catalogue with all the companies‘ contacts and the results of their job is produced.

 

The goal of 40 products for the exhibition was a difficult target to achieve and required a lot of creative management from the Design Centre team. Targets were fulfilled thanks to the great efforts of the team, which developed a programme of meetings for entrepreneurs to discuss several matters related to design management. “To experiment in practice” is one of the mottos of the Design Centre, which endeavors to insert concepts and tools of design management in companies through practice, in real projects in development. Grupo Criação (Creation Group) and Movimento do Design (Design Movement) are two actions implemented by the Design Centre. At Grupo Criação, periodical events are created for interaction among participant companies, in order to meet common requirements. Such interaction is performed through workshops and seminars. The Design Centre is nowadays seen as a catalyst of actions linked to design – a display window of design in Paraná.

 

In total, forty companies were involved in each edition of the programme. Companies came from a variety of sectors, including furniture, electronics, sports products and metal mechanics. The companies learnt how to hire a designer and how to manage a design project. They understood the importance of using design as a process to reach the global market.

 

The results of the second edition are impressive: of the 153 companies initially visited by the Design Centre team, 48 signed the Programme Membership Agreement and 41 prototypes were developed, involving 40 companies (35 companies from Paraná State and 5 companies from other Brazilian states). 18 projects were developed by internal teams, and 23 companies hired designers (18 studios and 5 independent designers).14 projects were undertaken by young designers with less than 3 years of experience, and 12 companies hired a designer for the first time. 7 companies developed their first product in series, and 19 products are already on the market. The 40 companies comprised 20 micro-sized, 16 small-size, 3 medium-sized and one large company.

 

The second edition of Criação Paraná was organized by four professionals, all of whom came from industrial design backgrounds. It received assistance on strategic planning from a team of consultants from the Design Centre. The programme received funding of approximately £92,000 from local/regional organisations (FINEP, Sebrae/PR, and Sebraetec) as well as approximately £26,000 of investment from the Design Centre itself. Each company paid for its own product development.

 

The Design Centre points to two key success factors of this programme:

1.       It gave companies the opportunity to experience the design process.

2.       Concrete results were achieved – 41 prototypes, a catalogue and an exhibition.

 

Formal measurements of this effectiveness were made through the number of designers hired, prototypes developed and products on the market. Moreover, as already described, Paraná Design Centre applied a thorough evaluation process after the first edition of the Criação Paraná. That helped to improve the methodology for the second edition.

 

As a whole, the exhibited products demonstrated the efficiency of the management method utilized in the Criação Paraná programme. Based on the concept of assisted development, now focused on the market or business, the Design Centre’s strategy with such a programme is to become a tool of assistance and guidance for companies interested in developing new projects. By identifying design as an instrument of innovation, the Design Centre identifies opportunities of use in the creation of products with good physical and formal quality, capable of reaching the market in a planned and competitive way. The Paraná Design Centre does not create projects or products. It does not “make design”, but arranges the necessary tools to perform a design project linked to the industry. Project design, nowadays, is understood as a process in primary need of being planned and managed to reach a good final result.

 

Paraná Design Centre’s next goal is to validate the methodology of insertion of design in companies, and to consolidate the form of approach utilized in the Criação Paraná programme, so that it can be utilized all over Brazil. It is a methodological system based on researches carried out by several Design Centres from all over the world and supported in practice by the Criação Paraná programme.

 

These results do not, however, guarantee a third edition of the programme. The main barrier to this is the need for funding. The Criação Paraná has now been discontinued because of the lack of financial support for a new edition of the programme. Funding has become the main barrier to the success of design support in Brazil.

 

Nevertheless, the Criação Paraná programme was one of the most important programmes to be managed by a Brazilian design centre. Companies received design advice, which means that they now know how to hire designers and how to manage a design project, as well as appreciating the importance of using design as a process. Nowadays Criação Paraná is cited as a reference for design support programmes. This is considered to be good practice on design support mostly because of the results achieved with few resources and the creative management involved in getting companies engaged on the programme. Moreover, Criação Paraná was a public success, inciting interest from several companies. Since then, many more have requested the Design Centre’s design support in a spontaneous way, forming what is known as Movimento do Design (Design Movement) and what was one of the programmes’ objectives.

 

Case study: JOKER COLLECTION  

 

Freso is a company specializing in the rotational moulding of polyethylene for industrial purposes, which started producing toys in 1988. In 1999, Freso became one of the first clients of the Design Centre. The company commissioned two design consultancies, Inove Design e Comunicação and Pac Design, both from the city of Curitiba in Paraná, to create a collection of children’s furniture. A collection composed of six products (play tunnel and seesaw by Pac Design; chest, stool, bookcase and toy organizer by Inove) was designed, although only three of the products were developed and released on the market: the chest, the stool, and the play tunnel.

 

In 2000, the Design Centre helped Freso commissioned Inove Design e Comunicação again, to develop a children’s playground, named Supremo and released in 2004, after four years of development. This product was present at the Criação Paraná 2005 exhibition. In 2001, the Design Centre assisted Freso in hiring the project studio Paradesign, from Florianópolis, after having identified a good market opportunity. Criação Paraná was once more the stimulation that Freso was missing to assume the task of developing a children’s furniture collection, the Joker Collection, which consisted of an armchair, a clothes rack and a bedside table. Unexpectedly, adults liked the armchair so much that it became an exclusive Tok Stok product, today available in its stores all over Brazil. The clothes rack and the bedside table are still sold by Freso for the young public. The Joker Collection received the Museu da Casa Brasileira Awards in 2002. Its designers stress “the freedom in the products’ conception and the openness of the company for new ideas” as an important aspect for the project’s good conclusion.

 

For further information about Criação Paraná please contact Letícia Castro Gaziri at Centro de Design Paraná: leticia@centrodedesign.org.br

Download a pdf of this case study


© Design Wales 2006