Perspectives on Design III

This paper investigates co-design methodologies aimed at enhancing local democracy practices through stakeholder engagement and direct cooperation between children and/or young people and municipal workers. The authors introduce their approaches to implementing the Democracy Reloading framework in their respective regional/national practices. Democracy Reloading, launched in 2015 as an initiative between Erasmus+ Youth and European Solidarity Corps National Agencies, is a comprehensive programme that identifies 24 essential competencies for effectively involving young people in decision-making within municipalities. The authors emphasise the significance of capacity building and mentorship for fostering long-term intergenerational collaboration, highlighting key findings from their co-design practices in Belgium, Norway, and Portugal. The paper underscores the collaborative efforts of Erasmus+ Youth National Agencies, practitioners, and experts, aiming to contribute to structural changes in local governance. The co-design approach aims to ensure setting up the foundations of the necessary changes in a systematic way. By exploring this topic, the paper sheds light on the relevance of this initiative for social innovation at the European and national scales.

University master’s degrees in design are specialized teaching–learning opportunities, where acquiring professional skills are intertwined with design research. Interaction design, an activity close to technological apparatus, to human–computer interaction and human factors, promotes objective notions of project development where designers act as problem-solvers. Still, interaction design training at a university can benefit from an approach which privileges broad creative skills, critical thinking and reflection, stimulating designers to be agents of change, through speculative proposals. We devised a curricular unit with initial research, practice-led methods and proposal presentation, with the intention of developing a course structure based on work phases, where research through design and speculative design come together to allow hypothetical, but socially aware design proposals. Three proposals are presented as case studies of this educational approach, which demonstrate the possibility of conducting speculative and reflective practice while addressing expected professional skills.

Porous liquids are a new class of porous materials. They combine the permanent porosity of solid sorbents with liquid fluid properties. Their basic unifying principle allows them to reinvent materials syntheses, eliminating separations. Are these characteristics used in our Design Education? Design is already an activity associated with other study fields. It is potentially transdisciplinary and transversal. It uses contributions from other areas in its objects and forms of communication. It applies other questions, brings new searches, and constantly expands its reality. But is the Portuguese Design Education System open to further knowledge? Is it a porous system? What should be known about design if we only know design? These are the questions this paper investigates. Five different Portuguese Product Design Courses were studied. The study program’s objectives and intended learning outcomes were analyzed. Each curricular unit—syllabus and teaching methodologies—was compared. The conclusion is that the design educational system gains with these porous, liquid, plural, and hybrid programs that embrace different expertise, practices, and cultures.

Graphic design has concentrated in itself the quintessence of all visual arts. It absorbs the most synthetic means of expression in order to unequivocally unfold the author's idea. It is closest to people, at the front line of communication, because it is positioned in all spheres of public and personal life. It is these qualities that make it responsible for the formation of sustainable attitude in consumers towards environmental and social problems. This article elaborates on important ethical aspects of graphic design and draws the attention on a vision of sustainable future in design. The main study is focused on the essential communicative means of graphic design—image, composition and symbol—in the context of the advertising industry. They are analysed as an expressive and artistic means of graphic design for communication, which uses the transformation of colors and shapes. As a result, the practical research offers a summary of the most common approaches applied in visual communication with the audience.

The textile industry is one of the most polluting sectors worldwide. The purchase of clothing has been on the rise, but it’s not accompanied by the recycling process. In Portugal only 1% of textile waste is recycled. However, several initiatives seek to reduce this problem. The “Escola Oficina,” established in 2015 in Vila Nova de Gaia, is dedicated to producing sustainable products from the reuse of industrial waste such as leather, fabric, paper, and cardboard. This study proposes, therefore, a digital solution to improve the management of this waste through the development of a mobile App that connects the “Escola Oficina” with its suppliers. This project uses the Design Thinking methodology, focusing on understanding the users’ needs and employing the iterative development of the solution. The App's design choices are supported by theories and principles established in the literature review. Through this App, validated through usability tests, it has been demonstrated how digital technology can help optimize textile waste management and, consequently, improve the sustainability of this sector.

This article presents a case study of a campaign developed in the context of university teaching in Communication Design to raise awareness among young people about the problem of dating violence, which is part of domestic violence and gender violence, behaviors that are a concern in our society. Gender equality is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) identified in the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda, equality that will not be achievable as long as gender violence exists. The ethical thinking and social responsibility of the Designer can be applied in the design and development of campaigns that inform and sensitize the public and educate young people. Designers, as promoters of culture and disseminators of information, can thus contribute to a better future aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. With this Case Study, we have promoted responsible design practices, with a focus on a social impact cause, helping Victim Support Association through pro bono design work, and we believe it fits into the principles of service learning. This campaign helped to make students socially responsible agents aware of the importance of their civic action and their active role in changing mindsets in a society that is still confronted with problems of violence between young couples.

This paper focuses on the case study of Escola Oficina (EO), a non-profit, socially-oriented organization that supports unemployed citizens by offering training and employability in the fields of sewing and cartonboard making, with an emphasis on circular economy and environmental sustainability. Although EO is successful in training and integrating their trainees into the job market, it faces external communication challenges and issues selling its products. This study aims, therefore, to tackle the stigma associated with unemployed individuals, while promoting the high production quality of its products. The adopted strategy was to create an online store to, thus, promote the products produced by EO’s trainees. This study focused on Interface Design and in the identification of the requirements and strategies that best help to fight the prejudice that traditionally lives amongst citizens associated with products that are produced in the context of social institutions. This project adopted a Design Thinking methodology, using a user-centered approach that was validated through usability tests. The results obtained are intended to serve as a basis for potential replication in analogous cases.

Design, as an area of knowledge enabled one to work with creative methods that act in complex situations and can facilitate the combination of interdisciplinary knowledge. To address the need to promote food literacy in children, design research can consider the current ludic context that aims to encourage learning through educational games. The methodology is qualitative and descriptive, based on an exploratory approach. This chapter explores the immersion that elapsed in the field, through participatory design and with the application of design cards about different stages related to foods. Then other UX (user experience) research methods were applied, based on the results of the participatory design experiment, to reflect on the thoughts and feelings of children, generating more specific insights. This allowed the creation of personas and scenarios, as well as user journey mapping, getting a greater awareness of the requirements that should be included in the product design sketch stage, increasing the possibility of the game being successful. As future research work, it is intended to produce and test a prototype of the projected analogue game.

What role does communication design play in the current crisis of information disorder? What ethical responsibilities and agency might communication designers have in solving the problem? This chapter explores the function of communication design in the era of online information disorder. I argue that when Swiss modernism was remediated on the web as the International Compliant Style (IC-Style), form and content became separated, along with a loss of ideals about the social responsibility of design. In the hyper-capitalist, digital environment of the 1990s, Swiss modernism became a style that, although suited to the technological restrictions of the early web, quickly became co-opted by ideologies of functionalist web design. This resulted in the application of the IC-Style across a variety of information with a disregard for the suitability of form to content and a focus on speed and profit rather than consideration of communication design’s responsibility to society as a medium between people and information. The dangers of this can be seen today in the crisis of information disorder, where the IC-Style has been applied to websites peddling mis/disinformation driven by perverse online economic incentives. The chapter concludes by exploring the ethical responsibility of communication designers in the era of information disorder, arguing that the social ideologies of modernism should be placed at the fore and applied to new communication structures that promote dialogue, discourse and slow, considered engagement with information.

Manuel Pereira da Silva (1930–2008), a Portuguese typographer, researcher, and type designer, made significant contributions to national typographic culture. Despite being relatively unknown, his work deserves recognition and rediscovery. Pereira da Silva learned typography from his father and pursued a career in advertising agencies before establishing himself in the graphic industry during the 1960s. He developed a passion for letter drawing and established a digital workshop in his office in the late 1990s. Self-taught and driven by his love for books, type history, and letterforms, he developed digital revivals of ancient typefaces and original designs. This study aims to shed light on Pereira da Silva's methodology through his typefaces, publications, and untapped archives, emphasizing the importance of documentation in the type design process. Furthermore, it explores how his work influenced contemporary national type designers. Despite limited awareness of his journey and accomplishments, Pereira da Silva’s work exemplify his unique approach and enduring impact on the national typography scene. By celebrating his legacy and projecting it into the future, this article seeks to honor his memory and inspire designers today.

This paper will look at the various aspects of documentaries to look at how they present a relationship of being-with between the viewer and the subject. Starting with Bruzzi’s update of Nichol’s taxonomy of the documentary. We will analyze how these forms present the documentary subject to the viewer. We will be focusing on how this enacts a relationship of being-with the other through a feeling of presence. We will see how being-with and our responsibility to the other is fundamental to the documentary. From here we will look at contemporary non-fiction installations to see how this relationship of presenting the other to the viewer has helped develop the emerging form. We will see how the documentary form has been transformed by installation. How its nonlinear format has created new ways of presenting this relationship responsibility to the other to the viewer. We will look at our relationship to media as found in Flusser and see how it relates to the idea of otherness as found in Lévinas ontology.

This paper explores the role of imagination in the field of design, particularly focusing on its possible applications to the process of Knitwear Design. In this context, knitwear is an example of both artistic design, as it is part of fashion design [Affinito et al. in The Design Journal 20:S2760–S2770, 2017; Stacey and Eckert in International Journal of Product Development 11(3–4):241–255, 2010], and of industrial design, when looking at the technology behind its manufacturing process [Conti in Design della maglieria. Strumenti e Metodologie progettuali, Lupetti, Milano, 2013; Motta in Designing Knit Designers. Teaching tools and methods to train professionals for the knitwear industry, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2019; Underwood in The design of 3D shape knitted preforms. School of Fashion and Textiles Design and Social Context Portfolio, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2009]. The contribution tackles the issue on three levels. Firstly, it focuses on the principal characteristics that the pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce attributes to the concept of imagination and how his thought is central to the contemporary debate on semiotic and design. Consequently, it analyses connections between design and imagination [Folkmann in The aesthetics of imagination in design, MIT Press, Boston, 2013] from a philosophical and aesthetical perspective, delving into the contemporary debate on how imagination is evolving in the digital era [Montani in Open Philosophy 3(1):187–201, 2020]. Finally, the focus is on the case of knitwear design, questioning how designers can acquire the skills and knowledge required to engage creatively with digital knit technology on several levels.

This work aims to present a strategy proposal for observing trends directed to the fashion industry based on free content available on the internet. Based on understanding some of the challenges of the fashion design practice in the post-industrial era, especially those related to the dynamics of trends, the strategy was structured and tested in a workshop with a group of students from a Fashion Design undergraduate course. From the results obtained, through observation during the workshop and two questionnaires, it is possible to conclude that the proposed strategy can be presented as a path for the development of the analytical and critical skills of fashion designers.

Change in production fields such as Fashion and Textiles, which are complex and intricate by nature, requires a new predictive capacity. Research and experimentation are the most appropriate terms of reference to build advanced perspectives that today, more than ever, look at the fundamental balance between artificial and natural. The approach or posture of design for Fashion acting in the present day cannot disregard multidisciplinary involving different disciplines and productive sectors. In disciplinary, design and production fields such as Fashion and Textile, the culture of design and the critique of the current production and consumption model, result in a digital model that transforms the logic of making in a predictive key. The objectives of productivity and consumption-oriented towards sustainability should consider the paradigm of organic meets digital and the latter expresses a mutualistic behavior that builds a solid perspective to drive change.

Based on the article published in 2022, “The 7 Complex Lessons from Edgar Morin Applied in Fashion Design Education for Sustainability”, and with the aim of looking at local cultural processes (instead of global ones) associated with Fashion Design education, we seek to develop the theme proposed around Edgar Morin’s sixth lesson, called “Human understanding: understanding each other”. In this way, we propose a reflection around the author’s assumption, the urgency of a collective look, endowed with understanding of the other, related to local cultural processes, mainly those associated with the traditional cultural knowledge of each region, as a way of enriching the curricula of Fashion Design. In this way, we discuss approaches that provide future designers with access to cultural knowledge that dialogue directly with creativity and constitute in this relationship, designers and local cultures, not only the perpetuation of ancestral knowledge, but innovation in products imbued with emotional, cultural and historical values. In a reflection, arising from personal experiences in the classroom and from contact with the academic environment, we realized that when we look at local cultures, it is possible to develop sustainable products through fashion design that respond to the expectations of a certain public, providing thus, consumers of their own identities, beyond globalized trends.

This preliminary research is part of a design investigation and seeks to examine the Portuguese higher education landscape in textile design and the challenges faced by the sector. The world is undergoing transformation, with an increase in problem complexity. Emerging challenges in sustainability, circular economy, decarbonization, and digital economy are impacting the textile industry. Textile designers must adapt their thinking and approach to address these challenges, making it crucial for higher education in textile design to keep pace with these changes. To determine the key competencies required by textile designers in their profession, a literature review and data collection were conducted, linking various research topics to stimulate reflection and open new perspectives in the field of research. The research concludes that there are essential skills for textile designers to effectively respond to these challenges. However, the availability of Portuguese higher education programs in textile design is limited. Bringing together textile design-focused education in a close partnership between academia and industry is imperative to prepare textile designers who will actively contribute to a circular economy and shape a promising future for the textile industry.

The industrialization of fashion and the consolidation of the Fast Fashion System result in the sale of fashionable clothing products at more affordable prices. The globalized media and fashion communication that disseminate in real time the novelties of fashion clothing causing a programmed obsolescence of the clothes that have already been acquired, stimulating production and consumption. The result is: a lot of waste generated, and many pieces of clothing are no longer purchased, and many clothes are discarded by consumers. Improper disposal of textile waste and post-consumer clothing results in a negative impact on the environment. Currently the city of São Paulo—Brazil is destined to landfills 55 tons/day. Some possible solutions to minimize the impact and to collaborate with SDG 12 which aims to substantially reduce the generation of waste through the Circular Economy and its actions of prevention, reduction, recycling, and reuse of waste are the use of Upcycling technique using discarded textiles as raw material and stimulating the Circular Economy. These solutions are presented by the Research Support Center of the University of São Paulo—Brazil conducting the upcycling contest and socio-environmental projects.

Considering the complexity of the Fashion Industry’s Productive Chain and the socioeconomic and cultural panorama of Brazil, this work, the result of a literature review, aims to investigate whether the use of the fundamentals of Prospective Ergonomics, coupled with the prospection of scenarios, guided by the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, allows to scrutinize scenarios for the future of work in companies in the Creative Economy. Furthermore, it intends to understand how the Fashion Industry’s Productive Chain will be affected by the transformations in technological development in the future, contributing to a process of innovation and sustainable change in the organizational project. As a result, we expect to provide conditions for innovative projects with added value to products and services within the area of Prospective Ergonomics, aiming at competitive sustainability, productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency of organizations, through problem solving, generation and application of innovation processes. We emphasize that this work is configured as an initial reflection of the research. Therefore, it disseminates an embryonic academic provocation about the problem, considering the multiple challenges of researching Prospective Ergonomics and Creative Economy in a complex and polarized society. The methodological design adopted comprised exploratory research of a qualitative nature and the method chosen was Grounded Theory.

The lifestyle changed and the evolution of mobile technology made it possible to introduce new nomadic ways of working. The future of work lies in a hybrid model between remote and on-site work. Covid-19 accelerated the change to more flexible working models. Trade fairs dedicated to workplace furniture show the trends of collaborative and modular furniture for these new working sceneries. As well workplaces express the need to acquire versatile furniture to create more collaborative work environments and creative experiences that we cannot have at home. This research intends to recognize furniture design as a modular and flexible feature that contributes to the creation of atmospheres compatible with these new forms of cooperative and agile work. The research was carried out by studying five visited trade fairs dedicated to workplace furniture and a sample of workplaces, considering the premises: function/comfort, materials/sustainability and flexibility/form. The principal output of this study is evidencing the relevance of furniture design in the creation of more collaborative and sharing scenarios in new dynamic working models, to improve the wellbeing and sustainability of work communities.

With this paper the authors wonder to know if the introduction of a creative processes between the design research, the business sector and the music and performing arts domain can be a sustainable and innovative solution. Methodologically the study is exploratory and generative. The authors will study what exists and has been done to produce new information and knowledge. The paper is focus on the process of creating a documentary film as an artistic and experimental typology. The documentary film describes the productive development that brought together participants from the three areas already identified. Together, they designed a streaming show on the stage of a theater in the North of Portugal, during the pandemic period. With this philosophy in mind, the authors want to prove that it is possible to create alternative models of education programmes to ensure quality education. In addition, partnership with local organizations can be an occasion to create sustainability, stimulating business competitiveness and effective improvement on the shows produced.