Bagunçada igual a gente: formação crítica e prática de liberdade no laboratório de design contra opressões

Abstract

Understanding project as a problem-solving activity may obscure its existential dimension, which includes its political, cultural, and historical interests. The denial of this dimension in design education leads to a seemingly neutral praxis that is, in essence, linked to the interests of dominants social groups. This undergraduate thesis presents the dialectical-existential perspective on the design by Álvaro Vieira Pinto and Paulo Freire to underpin the extensionist praxis of the Laboratory of Design against Oppressions (LADO) at the Federal technological University of Paraná (UTFPR). To achieve this, the experience of the LADO Working Group titled “Nosso LADO” (Our SIDE) will be systematized, which, through participatory design, sought to modify the spatiality in which it carries out its activities. This experience took place during the year 2022, a year in which the sanitary requirements to combat COVID-19 began to be relaxed and also the last year under the government of former president Jair Bolsonaro. In order to focus on one aspect of the of the experience and avoid dispersing efforts, I intend to explore how the practice of participatory design can change people’s consciousness about the design profession and the realities in which they live. The description of this praxis reveals pathways to experience freedom in the field of design as a practice carried out as a collective body, which, in projecting their existences, project itself.