“Nutrir com”: uma experiência degustativa sobre Design & Saúde

Abstract

In this work, we seek to investigate how design can contribute to improve the healthcare in Brazil. Based on authors such as Donna Haraway, Arturo Escobar and Pablo Solón, we propose that health is relational. In this sense, we understand that, to create ways to solve or, at least, to soften the current problems, we need to understand the relationships that conform it, guided by tentacular thinking. Throughout the text, we make a background about health in Brazil, from the struggles that originated the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS), to the identification of the territory as a fundamental track to understand the entanglements of health. SUS is the materialization of health as a social right and has popular participation as one of its guidelines. Thus, "participate" becomes a key word, or even a key verb, when we want to talk about practices related to Brazilian health. However, participation is impaired by what would be its opposite, marginalization, which, as the term indicates, puts certain groups of society at the margin of both decision-making and full enjoyment of public policies. Taking this problem to the design field, we believe that, through participative actions, it would be possible to create and stimulate new ways of doing with, contributing to autonomy in health. As one of the partners of the network called Arranjo Local da Penha (ALP), the field work was developed with a group of women, patients from the nutrition service of the Dr. Felippe Cardoso Family Clinic, located in the neighborhood of Penha, Rio de Janeiro. We stared to work there after the city hall's decision: the fire several professionals from the Family Clinic, including the nutritionist partner of ALP. Thus, we began our meetings by the challenge of keeping the group together and seeking forms of resistance, considering the problems that they faced in the region. Using tools such as Conversations Dispositifs, defined by Barbara Szanieki and Zoy Anastassakis, and the provotypes, concept by Jared Donavam and Wendy Gunn, we experienced a collective material production, through which we observed that being part of the productive processes was able to stimulate women's autonomy and self-valorization. We also identified, beyond the theories, that health is, in practice, sympoietic, inspiring us by the term "simpoiesis", by Donna Haraway, through the perception that affection and territory are elements that form the tentacles of mental and environmental health. The partnership between design, health institutions, patients and social movements, make us to reflect on design as a tool capable of "nurturing-with" new relationships and new ways of life in the face of turbulent times. Finally, we understand that the meeting between design and health is necessarily sympoietic, forming the field of Design & Health.