Designantropologia no Brasil: uma aproximação

Abstract

This work is constructed by drawing a mesh from the academic production of design-anthropology in Brazil, taking as its starting point the production of LaDA (Laboratory of Design and Anthropology), at the School of Industrial Design, State University of Rio de Janeiro (ESDI-UERJ), and NIDA (Narratives in Innovation, Design and Anthropology), at the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA). Aiming to correspond with this trajectory, in order to get closer to what is and isn't in it, to what it constitutes, the work poses the challenge for the author of having her own place of “belonging” as a field of research, considering her own narration, in the first person singular, to be crucial to this story. This research investigates how encounters between design and anthropology have taken place in Brazil, in association with what we can call design anthropology (IZÍDIO, FARIAS, NORONHA, 2022, p. 5), or design anthropology, which results from a series of correspondence practices between these fields of knowledge and research collectives. This research shows the capillarity of the approach in Brazil, with LaDA and NIDA as its main production centers. It assumes a lack of definition in its nomenclature - approach, subfield, philosophy, among others - insofar as it understands DA as being in constant reformulation and movement, but defends its consolidated existence in Brazil as a mode of knowledge production. This mode is committed to deconstructing generic formulations that mark the origins of modern design, willing to reflect and build radically situated practices that are attentive to the hierarchical power relations that exist in our territories.