Up Start–Creative Industries. Assemblage for Immigrant Integration and Creative Heritage Preservation

The Up Start-Creative Industries is the result of a collaboration between the Aga Khan Foundation and the University of Évora (UÉ), financed by the Portugal Social Innovation program. It focuses on a synergy founded in design for social innovation, heritage, and management. Within this collaboration, the UÉ has been conducting research on constructing an alternative economic model based on socio-cultural innovation and creative ways with disenfranchised individuals. The hypothesis advanced by the Up Start initiative is based on the possibility of leveraging participants’ income and improving living conditions for the communities involved – migrant groups from the Lisbon metropolitan area – through the development of cultural and creative industries, beginning with the identification and mapping of methods, arts, and crafts created by migrants from their cultural heritage. The paper is composed of three parts: the first part critically analyses the network of interactions between all actors involved in the project, the creation of the Bandim cooperative, and the production of handicrafts, in the light of the concept of assemblage, by the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari; the second part investigates how the preservation of cultural heritage is a key factor for the development of an alternative form of entrepreneurship of disenfranchised people; and the third and last part makes a critical reflection on how Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and e-commerce can improve communication, access to information, collaboration, and economic sustainability of social and cultural projects such as the Bandim cooperative.