On the South Korean island of Jeju, the haenyeo have been diving into cold waters for generations, rescuing from the depths of the sea future delicacies for other stomachs. They are known as the women of the sea.             Being a designer is much like being a haenyeo. In the face of an impulse, one must dive and bring to the surface what is characteristic of a soil and needs to emerge. It is through this continuous dance between exploration and the act of revealing that the identity and ethos of each place are woven together.             As for the women of the sea, the freediving that this entails invites comings and goings. At the encounter with the surface, new ideas, contexts, and horizons are unearthed; in the deep waters, one silently seeks answers to questions and awaits the moment when clarity arrives. This is not work for one alone. It is rather a collective dance made up of repetitions, no faster than the rhythm of shared knowledge, where design acts as the catalyst for multidisciplinarity, enabling encounters and growing something that is new, despite having always been there, hidden in the sea.             Creating is like cultivating a soil: to understand that what is nurtured is born from and thrives within a collective that builds and shapes, but also from those who intersect, relate, or engage in the construction and growth of what is created. The soil is worked by attending to the collective—not as a pre-existing social structure, but as an active way of being within a context. It is a joint act of convergence, balanced between emergent doing and constant re-rooting: in other words, between a shared understanding of the future and the past.             What we seek is an honest harmony between form and content. A common practice that weaves an understanding of how things grow and are revealed. We are designers as we walk, sing, think, garden, tell stories, and cook. The impulse of the dive is the same—the need to connect dots, realities, to bring together ideas, to contaminate them, to express them. To find a complement to words, which convey so little, by seeking other elements that compose a universe: an image, a story, a soundscape, a movement, a material, a colour. A weaving that reveals itself, if we allow it, from the inside out.             Like the tide, it arrives full of questions and returns without answers.

portuguese ↓