Description
Book SynopsisFrom 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 perso
Trade ReviewZoy Anastassakis and Marcos Martins take us on a personal journey through the challenges of leadership, management and teaching in a design school during times of uncertainty, precariousness and government neglect in Brazil. Weaving together stories of everyday experiences demonstrating at once alternative ways of thinking design acts, the resilience of educators and students, and the bonds that are developed when a situation and a state is on the brink of collapse, this book is an urgent read for all design students and educators. -- Dana Abdullah, University of the Arts London, UK
In this account of a present intensively lived, Anastassakis and Martins reveal the individual struggles and collective actions of ESDI’s prodigious community of precarious lives. Reimagining the first and foremost design education institution in Brazil, Latin America and the Portuguese language demanded shuffling functions, challenging privileges and questioning conventions. But also claiming resistance, vulnerability, care, interdependence, coexistence and solidarity as essential terms of a design lexicon they generously share with us in this momentous book. -- Frederico Duarte, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Hope is perhaps the element to be harnessed in a time that insists on oppressing and in which different ways of doing things are designed to circumvent the investments of domination. In these margins, scribbling is the act of imprinting life, whether it be to inscribe battles and continuity, or to strike through the logics that paint a world obsessed with a single, exclusive method. Education, when it becomes an inventive and radical stroke of life, affirms itself as an ordinary task, as everyday acts that give other contours to the margins. -- Luiz Rufino, Rio de Janeiro State University, Brazil
Table of ContentsList of Figures Foreword,
Timothy Ingold (University of Aberdeen, UK) Acknowledgements Historical Background Map and ESDI Ground Plan Introduction 1. Landing 2. Curriculum 3. A Land-slipping panic 4. Drawing Together 5. Crisis 6. Design Research 7. Impasses and Correspondences 8. How do you get to the university? 9. Walking barefoot Bibliography Index
