Publication of the Design and Anthropology Laboratory in the Laboratories Collection

In line with the work plan submitted to Prociência/Uerj 2017 under the title ‘From social innovation to collective imagination: a study of new forms of engagement and participation and their correspondence with teaching and research in design’, the postdoctoral research project is dedicated to deepening and specifying the general objectives presented to Prociência, namely: to investigate the relationships between forms of engagement and participation with design teaching and research processes through a study that combines modes of knowledge production in design and anthropology, thus contributing to the advancement of research on design education and, concomitantly, to the consolidation of the field of studies called design anthropology. In order to achieve these objectives, the methodological approach adopted for the research combines five different work fronts, namely: 1) state of the art and literature review in anthropological theory, in search of reconsiderations of anthropology as an open, engaged, creative and imaginative research practice; 2) state of the art and literature review of studies in design anthropology; 3) field and archival research into educational experimentation in design, for example in the archives of the Bauhaus (1919-1933), and the Ulm School (HfG-Ulm, 1952-1968), and in other design schools in operation today in Europe; 4) comparing the material collected in Europe with the ethnographic data collected by the researcher in Brazil between 2016 and 2017, around the Esdi Aberta movement; 5) preparing an essay of speculative fabulation that seeks to indicate why design education can be relevant not only to the training of design professionals, but also to the training of a new type of anthropologists, able to engage with those they research, through relationships of collective imagination and correspondence.

this project seeks to redefine, in anthropological terms, what constitutes design education and research. By specifying the originality that distinguishes them, namely the pedagogical and investigative approaches of (1) learning by doing and (2) collective imagination exercises of transformative futures, the research is complementarily orientated towards a reconsideration of design teaching and research through an anthropological analysis. By combining design and anthropology, it will inevitably also contribute to broadening the scope of studies in the emerging field called design anthropology, which brings together researchers from both areas in search of establishing symmetrical relationships between modes of knowledge production specific to the two areas of study in order to produce innovations for practice and research in the social sciences, such as anthropology, and in the applied social sciences, such as design.

Deseduca Laboratory's contribution to the PPDESDI Laboratories collection

This project brings together researchers and research laboratories from the PPDESDI (Postgraduate Design Programme of the School of Industrial Design), according to four approaches: (1) Development of history, theory and research in design; (2) Design thinking, implications for design teaching and education in general; (3) Collaborative projects in the fields of politics and production; and Design and the business environment.

This project seeks to situate Design in the face of the dilemmas, challenges and potential posed by the emergence of a new geological era in the history of planet Earth, marked by intense and vertiginous environmental changes. This era has been designated on the basis of an increasingly evident mark associated with a certain type of human action: the Anthropocene. In order to investigate the implications of the Anthropocene for the making of design, the project is organised on four fronts: (1) Bibliographical review and survey of the state of the art of studies on the Anthropocene, both within and outside the field of design; (2) Situated Anthropocene: ethnographic, historical, geontological, narrative and speculative research in the historic city centre of Rio de Janeiro; (3) Learning by doing with Afro-indigenous perspectives; and (4) Design as a practice of permacultural correspondence. Aiming to gather scientific support for tackling contemporary social issues, such as maintaining living conditions in the Anthropocene, the project links social and anthropological approaches to the field of Visual Programming Design. Combining various methodological approaches, the project coordinates a series of teaching, research and extension actions to address the following objectives: To investigate what characterises the Anthropocene; To identify the implications of the new geological era for the making of Design; To gather reference material on Design and the Anthropocene; To point towards epistemological and methodological revisions in the field of Design in response to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene; To situate the Anthropocene, investigating the specificity of its incidence in the central region of the city of Rio de Janeiro; To circulate sustainable social knowledge and technologies, such as those produced by indigenous peoples, quilombolas, terreiro peoples, and movements linked to agroecology and permaculture; And to apply Visual Programming skills to the widespread dissemination of the knowledge gathered.