The Design-Fiction laboratory at ESDI/UERJ carries out research at the interface between design and various fields of the humanities, always investigating the links between the processes of material production and the processes of value production - both in the moral sense (good/bad) and in the epistemic sense (true/false).

We are a research laboratory that works at the intersection of the areas of design and the humanities, including philosophy, history and literature - we are therefore interdisciplinary (or, as we prefer, undisciplined). Much of the work we do is conceptual and speculative, in the sense that we try to understand certain ideas or ways of thinking related to design and reflect on what the consequences of accepting them might be. Note that we don't question whether ideas are true, in the traditional sense of whether they correspond to a supposed objective reality. We believe, with William James, that something is true only for the same reasons that lead us to consider it true; or, to put it another way, that something is only true according to certain parameters, but that, in order to think about the parameters themselves, we have no parameters at all. This doesn't mean that we don't accept certain parameters in order to carry out certain jobs, just that these parameters are never taken as absolute and are always up for debate - they are, as we understand them, fictions!

In more practical terms, this is what we do: we research, write, edit, publish, discuss, criticise, speculate, teach, design... in short, we dedicate ourselves in various ways to passing on our intellectual efforts. We hold a weekly study group and every year we organise a seminar, ‘Encontro com o Demo’, in which members of the laboratory present their research in progress.

CNPQ-accredited research group:
https://dgp.cnpq.br/dgp/espelhogrupo/606446