From 2016-2018, teachers and students at the State University of
Rio de Janeiro in Brazil found themselves at the center of a
crisis. A new right-wing government suspended payment of staff
salaries and student scholarships and stopped funding basic
maintenance. Everyday Acts of Design tells the story of how the
university’s design school reacted to the crisis: not with
despondency or despair, but by promoting a series of radical
teaching experiments. Working together, students, alumni, teachers,
and staff embraced hope as a method, demonstrating that it is
possible to find positive answers even in a situation of imminent
collapse. The case histories narrated in the book provide
alternatives to conventional forms of design teaching, but also
prove that education can be a site for democracy and the practice
of freedom. Deprived of the activity of creating for an imagined
future, design can still assert a way forward through practices of
making and experimenting. Drawing on their personal experience of
designing and teaching design at a time of crisis, the authors
assert the value of a design attitude which, in refusing to be
delimited by the forethought of designing, insists on a radical,
experimental practice as a means of survival. Although a multitude
of voices, both assenting and dissenting, are present in the text,
the authors do not hide their own position, making it clear that
their stories are not a balanced mosaic of polyphonic positions.
The contemporary attack on free public education, fueled by the
growth of far-right regimes all over the globe, relies on a
totalizing univocal conception of ‘truth’ as a means to shut
down a plurality of thinking. Against this, this book adopts the
partiality of historical and cultural truths as an urgent and
explicit counter-attack. Adopting a consciously international
approach,the authors connect and compare their own story with those
of similar design teaching movements in the Global South, such as
the Barefoot School in India, and ZIVA, founded by Saki Mafunkikwa
in Zimbabwe.
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