Insights from a design-led inquiry about rural communities in Brazil

This paper describes the trajectory of an inquiry about rural communities in Brazil that was simultaneously an inquiry about the “research-practice gap”. The journey begins in 2014, when the authors carried out an experimental qualitative research project about sustainability in rural communities. Within the field of public policy research, an interdisciplinary team visited six ecovillages and six settlements created by Brazilian agrarian reform (assentamentos) and gathered multimedia data through interviews, pictures, observations and documents. These were then analyzed using a constructivist approach. As outputs, besides the usual PDF, the project produced artifacts focused on reaching audiences outside academia. It also resulted in the creation of OndaPolitica, a start-up centered on experience design that translated some of the insights into experiments. In this paper, we narrate the first long phase of our journey (from 2014 to 2015) and explore how an academic research project designed to go “beyond a PDF” opened up possibilities to further understand connections between rural and urban spaces.