Design research is hard.  It is even harder in a foreign country with only two weeks of field research, so advance preparation was essential before our trip.  But even with a full term of secondary research and a native Paulista leading our group, we embarked from Evanston with several misconceptions.  Whether because of cultural expectations or just a lack of information, our plans and goals had to constantly adjust with the new findings.   On the plus side, some of these learnings became our strongest design parameters, and developed into our insights.  Here are three of our biggest faulty assumptions going into the trip:

We Thought: Our reading coming into the trip described newly legislated recycling in Brazil as a simple circular process.  The 2010 laws included a victory for catadores, or waste pickers, stating that they would help provide collected recycling trash into the ecosystem.  We expected this to happen in one of two ways  (see picture):

• Individual catadores drop off waste at recycling facilities (the straight arrow)
• Catadores create collectives to aggregate their recyclables and send them in bulk (the light blue rectangle)

We Learned: The heart of our research schedule was to meet with several recycling cooperatives first, and then to try and find the solo or "autonomous catadores". This way, we could cover both types of collectors.  All I can say is we were naive. 
Our first lesson was that cooperatives rarely, if ever, included catadores.  The coops had their own waste collection services, either with their own trucks or through municipal partnerships. Despite being adjacent in the value chain, every coop had its own reason for excluding waste pickers: cash flow issues, geography, reliability, the list went on.  
It was not until we visited a Sao Paulo favela that we met actual autonomous catadores living in the community.  Working directly with recycling plants, was not even on their radar, instead they were deeply dependent on middle men trading groups.  The reality is that in spite of the goals of legislation, catadores had no direct connections to the formal recycling economy. 

We Thought: Before our trip, our team agreed that the goal is to work with catadores because they are near the bottom of the financial pyramid.   We used a triple bottom line framework to describe our goals (profit, planet, people) but our "people" component was really about solving a human need with financial improvement.  Our class lecture about the cycle of poverty seemed to directly apply.

We Learned: The factors that influence a catador's socioeconomic status were far more diverse than expected.  Financial considerations were certainly a big factor.  Race, gender, sexuality, hometown, and personality all appeared in the stories we heard.  But time and again, we found the biggest correlation with unsuccessful outcomes is drug and alcohol abuse.  
The majority of the catadores we interviewed were drunk every time we met them.  By contrast, our bright spot users did not drink, even in some cases trying to spread their zero tolerance policies to the rest of the community.  

We Thought: Personally, I expected design thinking to be a secret sauce that would be our differentiator in our target communities.  Especially when considering specifically the recycling experience for catadores, surely the field would be wide open.  At the very least, 6 eager Northwestern minds would be an rare asset in this marketplace.

We Learned: Design process and "brave thinking" were constants in these communities.  From Giral to Universidade de Sao Paulo to the innovative efforts of the Vila Nova Esperança favela, it was a pleasure and humbling to work with incredibly knowledgable and talented partners during our trip.  Similarly, our expectations with users needed to be adjusted.  Our value came from "designing with", not "designing to" the community.  

We will be continuing to work on this project during the second half of the class.  Over the next 10 weeks, stay tuned to this blog for the solutions and business ideas we decide to pursue.  

Today was packed, and we started the day at the University of Sao Paulo e-waste recycling research facility, CEDIR.  We had a chance to directly confront the challenges of WEEE recycling, where knowledge of material separation is scarce, and almost all waste must be sent abroad for processing.  

Later our friend Miguel, the founder of design firm CAOS Focado, introduced us to his projects and partners at the Vila Nova Esperança favela.  We had a short stop along the way to meet Antonio, a recycling middle-man, before continuing on to the community in the far west of Sao Paulo.  The town leader, Lia, was very generous with her time and spent hours talking about the achievements, challenges, and history of the favela and herself.  Her efforts have made Vila Nova Esperança the first adopter among the neighboring towns for design challenges, sustainable gardening, social media integration and so much more.  In fact, we first saw Lia as she was managing the construction of a new playground.

Miguel is working on another of these projects: through the MIT D-Lab and IDDS, he has helped build an innovation center in the heart of the town, right across from Lia's general store.   A whiteboard calendar lists upcoming crafting workshops based on ideas from the community.  One of the best assets of the facility is the instructor and John Lennon doppelgänger, Taipei.  An engineer by training, we chatted with him at the end of the day, as he finished hand-wiring a battery pack for a remote controlled airplane.  At 5, he closed the shop, and hopped on his skateboard to begin the 2 hour commute across Sao Paulo back home.  

Raising a young daughter introduced Antonio to the wealth of educational resources in Sao Paulo.   Like a good entrepreneur, he enrolled in a course on business administration.  That introduced him to computers and his painfully slow typing, so he enroll in keyboarding.  Suddenly faced with the modern world of computers, Antonio's course load grew  to include "infomatica" or IT/Computer Science classes.  Note, all of this has minimal bearing on his day job running a recycling center, but Antonio definitely has a thirst for knowledge.  As a bonus, for the first time, we had an opportunity to add value by sharing information.  USP has courses on how to recycle high-value e-waste? "Do they have classes tomorrow?"  Hal Watt started bike recyclers in Africa?  "We can use the same technique to recycle our wires!"

The scholarly side of Antonio is one of the distinctive ways he projects personal strength into his environment.  He mentions setbacks like R$20,000 spent on a trash compressor that lies idle due to power grid failures.  It hardly dims his smile, since he and his wife Teresina run the recycling center effectively enough to provide for the family despite high operating costs.  For a man who believes "God comes to us in nature, in words, and in dreams," life on the edge of Sao Paulo features all three.

But for all Antonio's success, his impact on the community remains unclear.  The catadores who supply his recycling facility lead very different lives, and Antonio laments that his payments to them will be spent on drugs and alcohol.  Attempts to proselytize  "evangelical" Christianity have only seen a handful follow his path.   During our design synthesis, Antonio shuffles out as more of a highly impressive outlier than a leader.  For that, we had to walk on into the favela.

She is the subject of the next profile, Leah.