Design Education and Democracy at the Edge of Collapse

"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. Design Education and Democracy at the Edge of Collapse 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 forethough