Deep Brazil: a reality far away from the most central locations
In order to talk about innovation in non-central places, it is important to forget about your premises and just listen
by Maíra Gouveia
Research & Strategy at Questtonó
Just over 300 miles separate the capital Cuiabá from Sapezal, an upcountry town located in Mato Grosso, near Rondônia and also Bolivia. There are about 138 miles to the end of the MT-235 highway, that ends in Comodoro, the last city before the Brazilian-Bolivian border. Amongst all this, a landscape that intercalates cotton, soy and corn monocultures and the Pareci and Nambiquara lands, the latter visited by the anthropologist Levi-Strauss during his tour in Brazil in the ‘30s.
There we were, in a seemingly foreign place, only equipped with design thinking.
In the second half of 2018 I had the opportunity to be part of a great project at Questtonó. Our challenge was to understand the relationship between people who receive up to 4 times the minimum and how they relate to means of payment to propose new payment solutions. But one detail changed everything: we had to understand users who don’t appear in briefings often; those from the Deep Brazil, who don’t live in the metropolitan area of São Paulo or other big capitals, but in the countryside of Brazil.
Getting to those places was a big challenge already, one that only grew in size when we found ourselves facing the lack of infrastructure in the small cities that we were supposed to visit during the field research: Sapezal (MT), Piquerobi (SP), Sobrado (PB) and Luzimangues (TO). But nothing could prepare us for this immersion in a Brazil that many Brazilians do not even imagine exists.
Deep Brazil reaches people in a truncated, stereotyped and misinterpreted way. Living and working in São Paulo or other major capitals makes our knowledge and impression about our country biased — often out of sheer ignorance. It is said that those who live in São Paulo do not live in Brazil — just as people who live in New York do not live in the United States. This is something we should think about: when we practice design, when we propose solutions, who are we talking to? Most of the time, with Paulistanos — or Cariocas, or Recifenses, and even within this cut we generally only reach a contemporary urban context. Is it worth talking about innovation in these places?
Getting to Sapezal was difficult. We arrived at 5 am at the bus station in Cuiabá and boarded a bus with no air conditioning nor a toilet, hoping that 10 hours later we would be at our final stop. Luckily we were in August, at the height of the dry period in the Brazil midwest, and the bumpy road was not a total muck. The problem was the 106F heat outside — which proved to be slow torture inside the suffocating bus, red dust rising on a path marked by large stretches of emptiness. Six hours until the end of our trip, I woke up with a start and realized that there was no one else on the bus. With no signal on my phone and no water to drink, I thought the best thing to do was to fall asleep again.
When we go to a place like this, so different from our reality, our first reaction is pure surprise. It became clear that the routine there was well demarcated, dictated by the pace of work on the large farms that surround the city. This was a big discovery that guided our research findings. We were surprised by Sapezal, but Sapezal was also surprised by us.
At the bus station, we were approached by people who wanted to know what we were doing there. Our driver, Toninho, got in the car and said, “But how did you end up here?” At the hotel again: why are you here?
What we were doing there, and in other parts of Brazil, was the exercise of listening to other people, in the greatest sense of expression. At every home visit, in every group, in every conversation held in the square under a tree, we used all of our skills to talk to people about subjects they most likely had never had thought about before.
The proposed solutions were only possible because we realized the importance of understanding the life and context of the users — their fears, dreams and guilts, small details that showed us again and again that we were talking to people. Amid much distrust and shyness, our ultimate goal was to show that everything that was being said was extremely valuable. And above all, that everyone should feel responsible for building a better experience — for themselves and for the rest of the city.
The size of our challenge — and what we did — only made sense sometime later. We travelled to 8 cities and interviewed almost 800 people with unbelievable, sad and happy but mostly unique stories. Getting to know a little bit of each one of these people motivated us into designing the best possible solution for them. Research, when done right, is a work of empathy — your problem is our problem. We, the humble pioneers of Deep Brazil, had an even more important task — to be a spokesperson for people who had never been heard before. And that’s a giant responsibility.
So, as I asked before, is it worth talking about innovation in places like these? And the answer is very obvious: of course it is. Innovation belongs to all of us. No matter where people live, they’ll always be users of products and services that most of the time were created by people who are living in urban contexts, people who don’t share the same referential universe.
We need to understand how different users perceive value in order to create meaningful experiences, no matter if we are talking about products, services or brands. We need to take different points of view into consideration. Without that, we will keep on designing systems that are far below their real engaging and use potential.
Our mission as researchers, strategists and designers is to shape the desires and longings — whether from someone in New York, or from a resident in a Sobrado settlement. To orchestrate chaos, it is up to us to analyze it with an open heart. Take a step back, forget the hypotheses and just listen.
On the way back to Cuiabá, the bus had A/C. It had a toilet, and a few stops for us to stretch our legs and eat something. It felt as if I was crossing an imaginary portal back into what I was familiar with — but I now knew what was on the other side. Being a researcher is first and foremost being a person — and talking to other people. Design only makes things palpable, bigger — and helps us understand that in order to transform, we need to be open to being transformed as well.
