Ellen da Silva Damazio

This project takes place at the end of the BA in Communication Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon — a moment of unusual freedom, the particular protection the university still allows: the freedom to ask what truly matters to us as designers, as citizens, as people who use the tools of visual communication to intervene in the world. The brief was simple: complete the sentence “A designer at the end of…” and turn it into a communication design project. Working collectively meant learning to stay inside disagreement — and gradually, our questions converged on a single issue: authorship. Not as a settled category, but as a construction that needed to be questioned, especially in a discipline where production is always collaborative, always distributed across clients, technologies, contexts, and invisible hands. These questions extend a longer conversation. Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” (1967) opened meaning-making to the reader; Michel Foucault (1996) reframed authorship as a function tied to power — who gets to speak and be heard. Design, though, was slow to let go of its own heroes and origin myths. Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory” (1986) offered another model altogether: not the spear that conquers and centers a singular hero, but the basket that gathers, carries, and sustains — a way of narrating built around care and relation rather than authorship. “A Designer at the End of Authorship” is neither a thesis nor a manifesto — it’s a publication that tries to put its own questions into practice, making visible the negotiations, hesitations, and invisible labour behind any collective work. Rather than resolving authorship, it leaves traces of a process, treating some questions as more productive when left unresolved. See more here: https://www.twine.net/signin

• Designer
• Graphic Designer

FLUID.ai is a speculative, academic concept — not a market product — built to explore how affective computing might mediate communication in caregiving relationships, rather than to prescribe a deployable solution. It is an affective computing system designed to bridge the communication gap between non-verbal autistic individuals and their caregivers. Grounded in Picard’s (1997) definition of affective computing as computation that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions, the project departs from a central premise: internal emotional states often remain invisible. As Barrett (2017) argues, emotions have no universal expressions. They are constructed in highly contextual ways. The system consists of two connected objects: a lava lamp-inspired ambient device placed in the patient’s room, and a companion watch for the caregiver. As the patient’s emotional and physiological state shifts, the lamp responds in real time through colour, light movement, and sound. The watch mirrors these changes through colour and haptic vibration, keeping the caregiver informed without requiring constant visual monitoring. A sensitive mediator between a non-verbal autistic person and their caregiver. Translating what the body communicates but cannot say. See more here: https://www.twine.net/signin

• Designer
• UX Designer

Ting is a hybrid wearable-app ecosystem designed to restore the intimacy of real-world encounters. Worn on the upper spine, close to the vagus nerve, the device vibrates subtly whenever it senses an emotionally compatible user nearby, based on physiological signals that an adaptive AI has learned to read. There are no swipes to make, no profiles to curate, and no photo galleries to browse through, because the body itself becomes the interface. Developed for the Interaction Design course at FBAUL, Ting was grounded in Polyvagal Theory and affective computing, and shaped by a mixed-methods research phase with 93 participants, all pointing toward the same proposal: a shift away from performative digital socialising and toward presence, embodiment, and emotional resonance. See more here: https://www.twine.net/signin

• Designer
• UX Designer
• Web Designer