Zoy Anastassakis Visit – Talk and Workshop

We were very happy to welcome to Design for Change, Zoy Anastassakis, Associate Professor at and the former Director (2016–18) of the Superior School of Industrial Design, State University of Rio de Janeiro (ESDI/UERJ), Brazil. She joined us in September 2019 for a few days and delivered a talk and a workshop, whilst she is a visiting researcher in Lisbon.

Zoy’s talk was titled ‘Temporarily Open: A Brazilian Design School’s Experimental Approaches Against the Dismantling of Public Education’ and was followed by a Q&A/discussion. In the talk, Zoy discussed ESDI Aberta (Open ESDI), a movement of political pedagogy, and how it was initiated in Brazil’s Superior School of Industrial Design, also known as ESDI, in 2016–17 during a period of financial and political crisis. The movement involved the occupation of the school’s premises and social media by the students, and the establishment of new collaborative processes of design and pedagogy among the school’s numerous constituents (students, faculty, staff, alumni, partners). In her lecture, Zoy, who was ESDI’s Director during that period, discussed the political and pedagogical aspects of the movement, and how she sees the future of design education in the current political climate in Brazil.

Whilst at ECA, Zoy also ran a workshop for students on the decolonization of design language, based on Paulo Freire’s pedagogical methods. The workshop ‘To See in Reverse: Decoding and Decolonizing Design Language and Thinking’ combined the debates on decolonization of thought (Viveiros de Castro), borders and decolonial thinking (Escobar, McLean, Mignolo), world reading and decoding (Freire). This workshop aims to decode and thus begin the process of decolonizing design language and thinking. By inviting participants to look back at the ideology that informs their professional practices, Paulo Freire’s literacy methods help in the decoding of participants’ design cosmologies, allowing them to create new design languages.