Meu Rio: International Interdisciplinary Collaboration for Local Activism

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Lee-Sean Huang School of Visual Arts, Design for Social Innovation Geographics: Design, Education, and the Transnational Terrain Theme 1: Design Projects September 2012

Meu Rio: International Interdisciplinary Collaboration for Local Activism Introduction Meu Rio (“My Rio” in Portuguese) is a non-partisan civil society organization based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil that designs new interfaces for civic participation by creating online tools that connect citizens with government and each other and help ensure that people have a voice in the decisions that are transforming their city. It combines online tools and experiences with online and offline political organizing and public mobilization to bring Cariocas (people of Rio) closer to the democratic decision-making processes of their city. Meu Rio’s mission is to build a new political culture where everyday citizens are empowered to participate in the shaping of urban public policies that affect their lives. Alessandra Orofino and Miguel Lago founded Meu Rio. While the organization launched publicly in September 2011, Alessandra and Miguel first conceived of the idea for their hometown in a conversation that they had in 2008. They wondered if there might be a way to tap into technology as a medium for progressive social change in Rio through a greater degree of public participation and more diverse voices in civic life. At the time of their conversation in 2008, Facebook had a mere fraction of users it has today, but in Brazil, the social media site Orkut had a market share of 70% of Brazilian internet users. Avaaz.org, which has now grown into the world’s largest online campaigning community, was also growing rapidly in Brazil, where it was instrumental in helping to pass a national anti-corruption bill. The year 2008 also saw tremendous online civil society mobilization around human rights and the Beijing Olympics, which inspired Miguel and Alessandra to think of ways to mobilize around human rights and

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social justice in the context of Rio’s preparations to host the Olympics in 2016, which has also been marred with forced evictions of low income communities and other alleged rights abuses. Meu Rio is a response to the broader context of economic development and social change in Rio. The city has recently enjoyed a boom along with much of the rest of the Brazilian economy, which escaped relatively unscathed from the world financial crisis of 2008. This growth has been compounded with the flood of oil money coming from offshore drilling and the influx of investment money for the mega-events Rio is hosting in the coming years (the World Cup and the Olympics). Meu Rio sees itself as a convener of citizens’ voices and channel for public participation to ensure that the citizens have fair representation to address their needs and desires as powerful political and economic forces with their own agendas transform the city at lightning speed. I served as the founding designer and acting creative director of Meu Rio from August 2010 to April of 2012. During that span of time I spent a cumulative five months living and working in Rio, and I worked the rest of the time with a New York City-based team. I continue to serve as a creative advisor and ambassador for the organization. Alessandra Orofino and I also teach a course on design and participatory urbanism at the Design for Social Innovation MFA program at the School of Visual Arts. In this paper, I will explain the integral role of design in shaping and driving Meu Rio and explore some of the challenges and that arise from working in an international interdisciplinary context. Finally, I will conclude by providing synthesis and insights that designers and design educators can apply to their own work.

Role of Design at Meu Rio As a designer working on the original founding team of Meu Rio, I had the opportunity to shape the strategy, structure, and identity of the organization. The first task was to create a

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business and strategic plan and pitch deck for Meu Rio, which was designed to bring the idea of the organization to life and introduce the brand to partners and potential funders. Once we raised money to launch the organization and build the beta version of the website, we applied and translated the brand identity to an online experience and offline collateral. After the launch of the website, I helped design the team structures and innovation processes for the organization. The current team uses and adapts these processes to suit their work creating new experiences and campaigns. I will focus on telling the story of the identity design process, while also discussing the broader challenges, opportunities, and insights for designers and design educators. I arrived in Rio for the first time in 2010 along with Alessandra and our colleague Emmy Suzuki Harris. We went to conduct stakeholder meetings, user interviews, and preliminary research for the development of the brand identity. The first phase of our research involved total immersion. We travelled all over the city. We interviewed many Cariocas. We conducted observations and took hundreds of photos that showed the city’s stark contrasts between mountains and ocean, urban grey and rainforest green, modern and old, “asphalt” (officially sanctioned urban areas) and favela (informal slum communities). We found abundant sources of inspiration: the colors of tropical fruit and plants; urban street art with its rough aesthetic and perceptive social critique; the sensual curves of nature, modern architecture and the bodies of Cariocas at the beach. After finishing the first phase of research, we returned to New York and began drawing. I made several studies and sketches. I wanted to capture the lilting rhythm of the Carioca lifestyle and express the popular improvisational do-it-yourself spirit I had seen in Rio. After several more iterations and deliberation, we arrived at the final logo, which subtly evokes the form of a green coconut, a popular drink and snack sold on the beach and throughout the city. The irregular shape and imperfection reference Rio’s ubiquitous handmade signs.

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Challenges There are always linguistic and cultural challenges when working across countries, cultures, and languages. Before I went to Brazil for the first time, I had rough working knowledge of Portuguese from an intensive course I took in college. I already understood the language fairly well from my knowledge of Spanish, but was far from fluent in rapid-fire colloquial conversation. I had some cultural reference from Brazilian music and movies, and I had also began to train capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian hybrid martial art/dance, as part of my cultural immersion. Despite this, I had concerns about coming to Brazil with touristic stereotypes or postcolonial clichés that would affect my work as a designer. These stereotypical images and symbols of Rio include: the Christ the Redeemer statue, Sugarloaf Mountain, the wavepatterned pavement designed by Burle Marx, the beaches, Carnaval, Carmen Miranda, etc. I knew I had to avoid clichés and create an identity worthy of the city and its people. The challenge was to create a brand that respected and celebrated Rio’s authentic cultural heritage. While Meu Rio aspires to unite Cariocas under a banner of mass digital participation in civic affairs, we also were conscious of the vast class and cultural divides that separate the population. Our principal target audience is digitally connected young people in what the Brazilian government calls “class C,” a designation of household income that puts them at “newly middle class” or “lower middle class.” These young people make up a plurality of the population, but their interests are traditionally underserved in the traditional political decision making processes. On the other hand, people on the founding team and other organizational stakeholders came from more privileged backgrounds with differing aesthetic tastes and design values to which we had to appeal. Marianne Abreu, a freelance designer who worked with Meu Rio, captured the complexity of the class aesthetic divide when she saw an early design mockup and commented that it “has to look dirtier and messier to really cater to a class C audience.” The

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final “coconut” logo was chosen to represent a brand identity that was grassroots, but not “too street,” reflecting the city from a local, and not touristic, perspective.

Opportunities and Conclusions Since its launch in late 2011, Meu Rio has received recognition from the local press and members of civil society in Rio as a youthful force shaking up the political and civic life of the city and reference for internet-based social mobilization. Meu Rio has run several advocacy campaigns around education, sanitation, transportation infrastructure, and the legal recognition of Carioca funk parties, a genre of dance music associated with the favelas of Rio that has faced crackdowns by law enforcement. Meu Rio has also launched a crowdsourced petition site called “Pressure Cooker” (Panela de Pressão) that allows Cariocas to create their own hyperlocal advocacy campaigns and a collaborative questionnaire called “Truth or Dare” (Verdade ou Consequência) that helps voters get matched with their ideal municipal council candidate for the October 2012 elections. Serving as a “design co-founder” of sorts to the organization, with input to the strategic layers of organizational development, allowed me to position design as an integral part of the organization’s DNA. The concept of the “design co-founder” for companies has begun to gain currency in tech startup circles, and based on my experiences with Meu Rio, it is also an idea worth spreading to social innovation and activist organizations. While the site and scope of the project involved a city and culture foreign to my own, the international element of the team was valuable to the process in the way that far outweighed the linguistic difficulties and cultural differences. My Carioca colleagues were welcoming and patient with my initially halting Portuguese. I found that my “foreignness” was appreciated and valued for bringing outside ideas and a more distant critical eye to the Carioca and Brazilian culture in which we were operating and trying to create social innovation. I saw part of my role as a

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designer to be that of “translator,” as I helped to adapt tools and concepts that had been proven in other places and repackage them for the Brazilian context. Rio de Janeiro’s design and social innovation community, of which Meu Rio sees itself as being a part, is small but interconnected. It is a collaborative community open to sharing and new ideas. Open source is an essential part of Meu Rio’s identity. The bylaws of the organization stipulate that all of the computer source code created by the organization must be open source. The visual identity of the organization also reflects this ethos of remix and reuse through the use in the Meu Rio logo of the Creative Commons-licensed “Folk” typeface created by the Brazilian type designer Marcelo Magalhães. The novelty of Meu Rio’s design and technology-centered tactics has helped the organization gain attention from the press and the political elite, however as a young organization, its greater social impact is yet to be thoroughly measured and evaluated. Meu Rio has been in talks with citizens interested in replicating the organizational model in São Paulo as well as other cities across Brazil and Latin America. An upcoming challenge will be figuring out how to document and “bundle” the strategic, design, and technological elements of Meu Rio’s successes and to build the capacity of activists and social entrepreneurs in other cities to replicate the model. Ultimately, Meu Rio’s ability to create lasting and effective progressive change depends on not just new designs and new technologies, but new behaviors among Rio’s citizens. This will come from not just creating and introducing new tools but campaigning and organizing to ensure adoption of those tools and desired behaviors. Meu Rio co-founder and executive director Miguel Lago puts things in perspective when he says: “Technology alone doesn’t change anything. But tools used with the right strategies, can generate great results. It is nice to talk about ‘participation,’ but not everyone can make it to a street protest on a weekday afternoon or fit in a room to attend a legislative hearing. Digital activism breaks these physical

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and spatial barriers.” Design can help this happen by helping digital activists more effectively communicate their message and by designing experiences that facilitate these new kinds of civic interactions.

Gallery of Images Image 1: The makeshift structures of the Cantagalo favela contrast with the new and modern construction of a government-sponsored elevator and viewing tour for tourists.

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Image 2: Meu Rio staff and members demonstrate outside of the Rio de Janeiro Municipal Council with a banner that reads, “Meu Rio: Politics closer to Cariocas.”

Image 3: Meu Rio members after a demonstration outside the ministry of transportation questioning the sudden increase in bus fares.

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Image 4: The undulating pattern of the Burle Marx-designed pavement in Copacabana.

Image 5: Cariocas take in the sun at Ipanema Beach.

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Image 6: An example of the vibrant street art in Rio.

Images 7-8: Hand-painted signs of coconuts inspired the Meu Rio logo.

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Images 9-10: The author enjoys a refreshing coconut and the final Meu Rio logo.

Images 11-12: Initial sketches of the logo and color palettes inspired by the natural environment of Rio. Translations of the color palettes read from left to right: “Guava; Brazilian Flag; Sun and Sky; and Sea and Passion Fruit.”

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Images 13-14: Meu Rio stationery and collateral.

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Image 15: Meu Rio cofounder and executive director Miguel Lago profiled in O Globo.

Image 16: Meu Rio members demonstrate in favor of a higher municipal public education budget.

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Image 17: The author and Meu Rio cofounder Alessandra Orofino photographed in New York City with design research materials and work in progress for the School of Visual Arts graduate course catalog.

Image 18-19 (next page): Screenshots from Meu Rio’s Panela de Pressão (“Pressure Cooker”) and Verdade ou Consequência sites.

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