Projeto e autonomia: pressupostos pedagógicos para uma disciplina de Design na educação básica brasileira

Abstract

The thesis presents design field as a proponent of an education for making, in the form of a discipline to integrate basic education in Brazilian public schools. A Design discipline, which aims to develop competencies and skills related to designing and building things. This proposition is supported by the hypothesis that the lack of an education of this nature, throughout the country's history, may be directly related to the problems we face in terms of design and social economic development. We believe that the implementation of an education for making can start a process of intellectual and technical improvement unprecedented in Brazilian society. And, besides, that promotes a condition of individual and collective autonomy. There are four fundamental concepts that underpin our proposition. The first is the notion of autonomy. Seen here in the light of philosophy and social and political sciences, it presents itself as an end, a desirable objective and for which the efforts to think about education for making in Brazil are aimed. The second concept is the field of crafts. Supported by the premise that to make something is a way of thinking, the presence of trades becomes an essential condition for proposing an education for making. Crafts provide us with an important theoretical and technical background for the implementation of activities aimed at making manuals, housing, in a full-bodied manner, the principles by which hand, eye and brain skills are developed. The third concept is education, as a means by which a project of this dimension can be extended, gradually and consistently, to the entire population. The fourth is design itself, seen here no longer as part of industrial or artistic production processes, but more broadly, as liberal art and as rhetoric, as pointed out by Richard Buchanan. This time, design is evoked to the task of designing whatever it is, including, a discipline whose bases reside in the practices and knowledge accumulated by the field. Thus, this thesis goal is to relate the proposal of an education for making with the promotion of an autonomy sense, through design. For this, a discussion about relations between the fields of design, craft and education proceeds, bringing up issues pertinent to Brazilian historical and socio-cultural aspects, in order to build a reflection that welcomes the particularities of the country's constitutive process. With a desire to point out a path, among other possible ones, for the achievement of a condition of autonomy in Brazil, we relate design to education, through the teaching of design and craft practices.