Design and Activism

Abstract

The criticism of modernist European/North American historical projects has led, since the 1960s, to a revision of its assumptions and results from the countercultural perspectives and as a reconfiguration of the political force field from the new configurations of Western capitalism. With the processes of globalization and geopolitical adjustments, the flow of permanent displacements since the end of the Cold War, new possibilities of reading and operating in and on art and design have emerged privileging the critique and transformation of established reality. Within this scope, researchers, designers, artists, activists who, inside and outside the university, produce and reflect in the vast territory of art, design and activism. Their reports offer a dense and also panoramic design of possibilities in approaching the
proposed theme and, above all, allow the reader an approximation to, something planned by the dossier publishers: point out to transformative and committed roles that design and art can take in social reality. The proposals of authors and researches that deal with or dialogue with American, Latin American and Brazilian contexts and practices were privileged, as well as the contributions that incorporate the educational debate in conjunction with the thematic
fields indicated in the dossier.