o_19po8js951tvs1r0t1r8s4bb1vpla.pdf

Lucy Niemeyer
In the decade of 1980, I knew the beginning of the utilization of the digital
technology in the development of design projects. Many colleagues would go to
my office to know that technological news. Some of them expressed a emphatic
rejection to the digital means, in favor of the merits of the traditional way of working,
that allowed a great manual control without demanding the periodical and costly
actualization of equipments. Useless reaction – everyone succumbed, sooner or later,
to the use of the computer to make design. Thankfully we can change our words.
I accompanied the fall of the Berlin wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union,
the end of the great ideologies, the advent of a new scenario of post-modernization.
Also a new Brazil emerged with the end of the military dictatorship, the redemocratization,
the direct elections, the controlled inflation. A great sigh of relieve.
Events and political, economical, social, technological and cultural changes that
occurred throughout the 21 st century, determined a new zeitgeist. The intensification
of the globalization, of the communication and of the circulation of goods and
services, the elevation of the impact of the global heating and of the environmental
losses derived from the prevalent way of production, put into question the ways
through which the central countries had been orienting themselves.
In this beginning of the century, the new configuration of power and interests
of the central countries, derived from the circulation of occurrences like the North-
American and European economical crisis; the emergence of the economical group
BRICS, formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa; the successive
situations of tension in the Middle Orient; the political changes that occurred with
the Arabic Spring; the aggravation of the environmental impacts that problematized
the courses of the industrial production, established in the 19 th century and
consolidated in the 20 th century, and the ways through which products and services
were being created and becoming available.
The conjunct of the intellectual ambience and of the current culture requires
new guidelines to act and to be in the world, with evident consequences in the
professional action in design, that starts to have other commitments besides those
centered in the production in series, stuck to the modernist conception.
We are in the 4 th International Forum of Design as a Process. How can the term
“process” be understood? According to the Dictionary Houaiss, there are thirteen
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Cadernos de Estudos Avançados em Design - design e humanismo - 2013 - p. 141-148