Economy & Trade, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

/ARTS WEEKLY/ARGENTINA: Buenos Aires, a City that Inspires Design

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Nov 30 2005 (IPS) - A large number of young people are at the centre of an explosion of creativity in the Argentine capital. Now that the country has finally pulled out of a severe economic crisis, thousands of graduates of design courses have found much to be done, and they have set to with a will.

Adrian Lebendiker, director of the Centro Metropolitano de Diseño (Metropolitan Centre for Design), under the aegis of the Cultural Secretariat of the Buenos Aires city government, told IPS that “It was an incredible paradox, because the peak in the number of design courses coincided with the biggest fall in manufacturing output.”

Practically overnight, design courses took on a special attraction for students wishing to set themselves up in business as freelance professionals, or as consultants to small businesses that had turned to importing in the 1990s but with the devaluation of the peso decided to begin producing again and had to modernise their equipment and run-down premises.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has been taking a close look at this phenomenon, which is changing the cultural life and, indeed, the face of Buenos Aires.

In August, UNESCO conferred on the Argentine capital the distinction of “City of Design”, and Buenos Aires joined the Global Alliance for Cultural Diversity’s network of Creative Cities. The distinction was presented to the city at the beginning of this month.

According to UNESCO, “The city of Buenos Aires has been able to harness the energy and innovation of its design sector for development initiatives on a local, regional and international level,” and has developed “one of the most viable design industries” in South America. “Spanning the fields of fashion, architecture, industrial, interior and urban design with a keen focus on incorporating the latest technology and know-how, Buenos Aires is a city that inspires design,” it added. The city of tango has thus not only “diversified its economic growth potential, but it has also engaged a broad array of stakeholders in building one of the most vibrant and dynamic design scenes in Latin America,” the U.N. agency underlined.

In addition to an architecture and design tradition that goes back to the 1930s, the present design wave emerged timidly 20 years ago with the creation of graphic and industrial design courses in the country’s tuition-free public universities. Later, private universities joined the trend, and courses also began to be offered in clothing design as well as image and sound design.

The University of Buenos Aires alone now has 14,000 design students.

Nevertheless, it was never just a question of numbers. The 1990s recession and the crisis triggered by the late 2001 economic collapse created new opportunities in this field. With the recession, designers working for companies found themselves unemployed, and began to develop their own projects “purely as a means of survival,” Lebendiker indicated: in other words, on a small scale and without financial backing.

Young professionals began to design products that captivated the middle and upper income sectors in Buenos Aires, and design fairs mushroomed.

The “Pure Design” and “Fashion Week” exhibits were launched in 2001 and have since been held every two years, with the private and governmental sectors competing with each other. The fairs draw huge crowds of local visitors and foreign tourists.

CMD, which was inaugurated the same year, contributed the idea of “El Dorrego,” a market that operates on a regular basis with more than a hundred stalls selling products like decorative objects, furniture, clothing, table linen, accessories, toys and lighting fixtures.

“The Centro Metropolitano de Diseño (CMD) came into being when the State discerned that there were a lot of designers who wanted to produce, but they lacked the financial capacity and strategies to improve the products and produce them on a large scale,” Lebendiker explained. They were also experiencing difficulties in breaking into the market.

Two main strategies were applied to allow the ideas to take off. The first involved working with businesses to incorporate professional design into their production processes, and help designers to become suppliers of those businesses; the second, assisting in the development of promising initiatives.

At present CMD works with many small businesses, but also with the French hypermarket chain, Carrefour, and with Easy, a Chilean firm that sells household tools, objects and furniture. “They have 16 percent of the Argentine furniture market, and we want a share in that,” said Lebendiker.

At the same time, about 15 businesses are being “incubated” at the Centre. “IncuBA is helping business start-ups by providing a physical location to support designers who are pursuing projects with potential but who lack financial backing and business know-how,” he stated.

CMD selects the projects and then provides a locale with a telephone line for a year, renewable for up to three years. Legal and accounting advice is given to the start-up businesses, which are monitored by a team of managers. The owners are given training in business administration and contacts with networks of suppliers and clients.

“Many of the start-ups quickly prove to be non-viable, but at least one- third of them prosper,” the CMD director added.

One of the successes is “Replicante” (Replicant), the brainchild of two industrial designers whose business is dedicated to developing three- dimensional computer-designed prototypes for small and medium businesses.

Daniel Arroyo, one of the owners of Replicante, told IPS that he and his partner worked for the motorcycle manufacturer Zanella until the crisis prompted them to set up their own business. “But production design in general fell sharply in the 1990s, and we had to close down,” he said.

They then created the Replicante project and presented it to IncuBA. They attended the required seminars in order to become familiar with business management, and they competed against 54 other projects. CMD selected Replicante, together with eight other proyects, to offer services to designers and companies.

Their machines, which transform designs into three-dimensional objects, have been working “night and day,” just one year after Replicante was set up, said Arroyo. The firm also offers a service in which it digitalises three-dimensional objects, so that they can be improved on subsequently.

Arroyo believes it will be important to remain under IncuBA’s protective umbrella for another two years, since they receive ongoing training and because the people who participate in CMD workshops and seminars are “potentially our clients.”