Coralizando book (2014)

Coralizando is a collaboration guide for the creative economy. This book was written as a companion to Corais, an online platform for collaborative project management. The users of the platform suggested writing the book after the success of the Design Livre book, to feed new platform users with the concepts for organizing grassroots projects.

The text was co-written by 16 persons who experimented infrastructuring solidarity economy circuits and redesigning money with Corais Platform. Through its participatory writing process and its content, Coralizando not only advocates for a collaborative approach to problem-solving but also embodies it, aiming to inspire communities to co-create sustainable and inclusive futures.

The book is both a theoretical and practical guide to fostering co-creation, open innovation, and solidarity-based economies. The book is structured around four main themes: co-creation, learning through doing, economic frameworks, and collective management. Each chapter weaves together concepts, techniques, case studies, and tools, offering insights into how collaborative methodologies can address social and economic challenges.

Key concepts include the idea of a “commons” as a shared resource enriched through collective contributions, the use of open licenses like Creative Commons to encourage the free flow of ideas, and the emphasis on self-management and non-hierarchical organizational structures. It critiques conventional notions of intellectual property, arguing for a shift toward open and participatory innovation systems that prioritize collective benefit over individual profit.

The book cover is the result of intense collaboration among the authors. My role was to synthesize the comments into a coherent proposal. In line with the design livre approach, I generated the cover with Processing and finished the graphic design with Inkscape. The design process documentation is shared for anyone to see.