by Anna Szlendak
Today we are talking with João Sebastião Ataíde Goulão, an AYCH ambassador in Santo Tirso.
How did you discover AYCH?
Santo Tirso asked us to be a part of the project, because we are a few of people in Portugal doing circle economy and design in the same time. It was a pleasant suprise to work for the project. We´ve been invited, me and my team to be a part of jury of Hackathon of circular economies. So we´ve been mixed in all of that kind of activities. For us it makes sence to be a part of AYCH.
So, why did you become an AYCH ambassador?
The everyday world expands in knowledge but the distance between each of us shrinks. It is important to build good relationships between the various creative tribes across Europe. With the increasing mastery of digital tools, it becomes essential to add people capable of developing critical mass for new visions with social, artistic and creative effects. I would like to be a part of this moment in history and collaborate with this network of expectant and creative people.
What are you doing in your professional life?
I started working as an architect , after that i went to Rome to study environmental architecture. From then I started to do a project with friends, it´s called FLOWCO. It´s a project of design with use of recycling materials. We still are developing the project. It started as an start-up and now we are a company working with a lot of creative people. We established our network that goes from thinkers, at universities and institutes, to major industrial factories.
How does it fit into circular economy?
We try to apply the latest methods of design thinking to produce new products from waste. We also try to communicate to people about environmental awareness. We decided to go where the people are and there are a lot of them in music festivals, so we started to work with main music festivals in Portugal. We design equipment, furniture, we can say for those festivals, so when people are using these they can think about what was the concept and connect them with social sustainability. We created small brand called GOMA and it is dedicated just to created materials. With that we try to establish a new ecological and sustainable way of working and creating in construction business. World is now in this point when people start to understand that using recycling materials instead of traditional ones add a value to the product.
