Trampolín, a pioneering project that brings together people with an intellectual disability and creative professionals

Trampolín is a fluid platform where people with an intellectual disability and professional designers and creators come together to develop creative processes. Arising after an open call to professionals by Valencia World Design Capital 2022, the project has been selected within the Social Innovation programme of Valencia city council, and it also benefits from the support of other orgaisations such as the University of Valencia, Impresum and the association Plena Inclusió CV.

The initiative is based on the ideas that “everybody is creative if they are trained to be” and that people with an intellectual disability, thanks to the way they look at the world, have a great deal to contribute to the creative industry in fields such as advertising, illustration or design, among others. In this respect, Trampolín helps to promote their capabilities via a training and learning process.

The mechanism that enables a leap to industry

Trampolín is based on a maxim: learn in order to teach. The platform provides creative tools and trains design teams so that the results of this work will contribute value to industry.

Gimeno Gràfic, Luis Demano, Milimbo, Joan Quirós and Marta Pina are some of the professionals who have joined Trampolín to cocreate and design pieces in the training sessions, baptised with the name Colabs; working sessions led by professional designers in which people with intellectual disabilities overcome a creative challenge. It is their first opportunity to form part of a professional working session where they can put into practice the knowledge acquired in Trampolín.

In total, four workshops lasting several days will be held with groups of between 8 and 10 people at the centres of Renaixer C.O, the Patronato Francisco Esteve and shortly with Bona Gent.

Since its creation in 2020, the implementation of Trampolín has responded to the demands of platforms that work with intellectually disabled people throughout the world, for their empowerment and real participation in society, at all levels.

The era of cooperation and the power or design

Yvette García and Javier La Casta, creators of Trampolín, are art and design professionals. Yvette is a dancer and teacher, and Javier a designer and founding member of Nectar Estudio.

They consider that Trampolín is a space in which to benefit from the possibilities offered by design for the development of people with disabilities and their integration in the industry, and therefore to improve their inclusion in society. In this respect, Javier affirms that “Design links everything. Its power is so great that it also provides the necessary tools for the personal development and self-esteem of people with an intellectual disability,” he explains.

“Trampolín can assist in a generalised awareness, of schools, other bodies and social groups that do not know about design and its power as a tool,” adds Yvette García.

“This is the era of cooperation,” they say at Trampolín. “We do not want to do it alone, we want to share it. Our model is based on inviting people to learn from these people and, in turn, to teach other people.”