My name is Francisca Veloso and I’m a designer.
I’m interested in investigating how design can work with other subjects and vice-versa.
Social innovation, anthropology, maps and collaboration are themes I already worked with.

I graduated this summer from London College of Communication, BA Graphic Product Innovation,
Now I find myself  in Lisbon, where I’m from and working in Interbrand as a designer.

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My first post is going to be about one of my final major projects I did for university -  Collaboration Project.

It’s aim is to get people together and help them follow a process for a multi-disciplinary project, with people from different knowledge backgrounds.

The Collaboration Roll’s objective is to lead participants to rethink their brief, generate their own findings, get as many ideas as they can and other tasks which should follow the group until the very end of any project. It was designed to be shifted sideways to unravel in bits, it can be placed on the floor or a low table and it’s tone of voice is as friendly as a kid’s drawing table – inspired by Tim’s Brown TED Talk On Creativity and play. Why? So that you are encouraged to use lot’s of post-it’s, big markers pens, sketches and have no fear of experimenting, just like children. Finally, it promotes everyone’s involvement, by having the writing placed in four to six different directions, so that people feel that it’s their turn to read a part of it out-loud.

With this project I’ve learnt how tools and processes can be borrowed from one subject to the next, and reused in other contexts if adequate. After my research, which included interviewing people with different backgrounds about their tools and methods (a nurse, a copywriter, a fashion designer and a film maker + a few of my design colleges), my main question became:

How can the design process – out of the design context and language – help us work collaboratively?
This was how this project was born.

Francisca

Yesterday we gathered our first stage of Research for the first of a series collaborative projects.

This first one with BeyondPAR entitled ‘Togetherness’ is essentially to get together, lock heads, share ideas and see what happens.

After a couple of meetings we’ve decided to look more into Kaleidoscopes and the abstract shapes and patterns they create.

We asked people to select any number of coloured shapes they feel drawn to, associate a feel with, an emotional attachment or that may represent them in one way or another.

We hope to take each individual case and then ‘splice’ them and experiment by taking different people and mix them together.

With our homemade Kaleidoscope we’ll then begin to record the outcome… and eventually create digital and mixed-media visuals from what we find.

You can follow our progress on the tumblr and twitter.

Rich.