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.
