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.