Mafalda Moreira is an Interior Designer graduated at the High School of Arts and Design of Matosinhos (ESAD) where she developed some critical texts for the school publication “ESAD Questioning”.
At her senior year Mafalda exposed a prototyped project at FUTURE AMBIENTS exhibition at EXPONOR. Also result of a senior year project, Mafalda was invited by ESAD to participate in a collective exhibition to be at BIENAL de CERVEIRA and afterwards at Municipal Gallery at the Matosinhos City Hall.
Her projects were presented at several design magazines such has Experimenta (Spanish Design Magazine) and Espaço & Design (Portuguese Design magazine).
Until January 2006 she has been working with ESAD in the Communications and Projects Office, where she worked on the organization of events and publications, partnerships with cultural and governmental institutions and with foreign institutions including the co-coordination of European projects sponsored by the European Union.
Mafalda joined MIETE 1st edition in September 2004 andIDEAVITY in January 2006.

MIETE-BLOG: After the interview with the Mingle team talking with you was a must! Mafalda, please you tell us a little bit about your background? What lead you to design and to interior design and, finally, to Innovation and Entrepreneurship?
MM: First of all I’ve always had a wide range of interests. And doing a Design degree was the way to keep in touch with all disciplines that surround Design and explore all factors that contribute to make Design. I’ve started by Communication Design and afterwards changed to Interior Design because I felt the need to work the space and explore its interrelation with users. Communication Design is nevertheless always present in my projects because Design is also To Communicate. To make project come alive has everything to do with Entrepreneurship, so I decided to explore the Innovation and Entrepreneurship field. This revealed to me as an area in which creation and finding opportunities to explore are the key concepts.
The good thing about this Master Course was that I could adapt the optional courses to my profile and chose those that best fit my interests, namely courses from MSc in Multimedia Technology.

MIETE-BLOG: You joined IDEAVITY as Project Leader. Along the whole course your experience has been very interesting. You started by working on a fuel cell business concept, then moved to the Ortophoto Project with our colleague Sérgio Reis Cunha (see video of PSA project at MIETE-CAST – pt). For this project you and your MIETE colleagues developed a business plan that will most likely be used to launch the actual business. We also know that you have been working with the Mingle Team for more than a year. Can you tell us a little bit about how this collaboration started and your motivations to join IDEAVITY?
MM: This collaboration started on an optional course from the MSc in Multimedia Technology called “Human-Computer Interaction”. My colleagues were developing a business concept for teens communication via WEB and mobile devices and for that course we formed a group and developed a product concentrating on usability issues.
Has a team we developed a very good relation and most of all, we had lots of fun doing a project that became very interesting for the MINGLE concept.
During the first year of the master I’ve kept in touch with my colleague’s refinement of their business concept, giving some inputs in the design area: the project name and some possible services to create. From that collaboration emerged the invitation to join the team at IDEAVITY as project leader in January 2006. I’ve accepted the invitation and left my former job because I believe in the MINGLE concept and want to bring it to the teanagers all over the world.

Further reading: MIETE-BLOG Post dated from January 25, 2006: “The Teenager Digital Life Interface”.