Paula Dib finds beauty where you least expect it. Where most of us see only problems and scarcity, the São Paulo designer finds seeds that, with her support, will take root, blossom and bloom.

Learning about Dib’s personal trajectory helps explain how she developed her peculiar way of seeing the world. Born in São Paulo and raised with humanistic values at home and at school, she learned to acknowledge and value others, Dib told Believe.Earth. Before she started off on her career path, she spent time living with aboriginal peoples in Australia and with fishermen in Brazil.

Eventually, Dib decided to become a designer, but with a broader perspective: a social designer.

Her projects have touched many and various communities. In the arid countryside of the state of Ceará, Brazil, Dib helped connect local shoemakers with the European market. In Africa, by forming a partnership with educators in Mozambique, she turned bits of bamboo and corn husk into materials for educational toys. In London, Dib created an art installation in a school courtyard with the aim of mobilizing the community to rethink their conflicts and value the diversity of the school’s students.

Dib won the International Young Design Entrepreneurs of the Year Award in 2006. She currently dedicates her time to documenting the situations she’s encountered. Recently, she co-directed a documentary film showcasing the work of leather artisans in the Cariri region.

‘AN INQUIRING MIND’
Where does Dib’s desire to do innovative design come from? Dib cited an experience she had shortly before she went to college. During a student exchange trip to Australia, she said, the then-18-year-old backpacker decided to drop the English classes her parents had arranged for her. Instead, she’d go volunteer in an aboriginal village.

Along with learning about local traditions, Dib saw firsthand the massive impact of the arrival of manufactured goods in the village. Her job was to help the villagers deal with  garbage, which had never been a serious issue for them before.

“I ended up staying with the aboriginals for two months,” she said. “I really liked to observe their way of working and their relationships with one another.”

At that moment, Dib, who’d planned to study art, decided to switch tracks. Upon returning to Brazil, she entered university and began learning about industrial design. Still fresh from her Australian experience, Dib would question the social roles of design and designers, and their relationship with consumerism. Do we really need so many products? Must we imitate Italian design trends? How can we reduce the environmental impact of industrial production? How can design improve people’s’ lives?

After graduating, Dib maintained her “inquiring mind,” as she puts it. Other designers have followed her lead, incorporating Brazilian handicrafts in their work. Over the years, Dib has been involved in over 30 projects serving both urban and rural communities in very different parts of the country.

In Helvécia, in the southern part of the state of Bahia, for instance, Dib led a team of designers in setting up a meeting with a local community organization, to find ways of marrying local artisans’ techniques to the materials that were available in their surroundings. Thus, they created crocheted cloth made from eucalyptus bark.

After that, the women of Helvécia learned to weave a complete set of products, including fruit baskets and lamp shades. The initiative brought design, handicraft technique and the sustainable use of natural resources together in an innovative way.

“People call me ‘sustainable designer,’ Dib said, “but I don’t think sustainability can be treated as a label. It’s not an end in itself, that we can simply achieve or not. It’s actually a proposition, a position toward life. We are proposing  meaning, a new condition, some coherence. I would say my main occupation is to give things meaning.”

Whether working with traditional shoemakers from Ceará, with college students from Hong Kong, or teachers in Mozambique, Paula’s conduct mirrors her constant search for coherence between form and content. A search in which the final outcome is seen in a broader context, valuing the processes and the people involved. It’s a way of looking with criticism at our production and consumption habits. That is the path her inquiring mind takes, venturing ever deeper: “How can we create a fairer society?” That is one of the fundamental questions that inquisitive designer Paula invites us to ask ourselves.