A Decolonial Approach to Brazilian Design: Lina Bo Bardi’s Contribution to Embracing Projects
In recent years, it is common to associate a decolonial perspective to different areas of design. This occurs mainly when one thinks of a “Brazilian approach” to design. The discussion becomes heated when it is followed by other questions: who are, after all, the people who create Brazilian material culture, generating products-services-communications? The idea of a decolonial approach to design still questions the aesthetic and functional standards reproduced for so many years by many local creative professions: why does it seem so difficult to break the white-centering predominance both in academia and in the design market? How can original, popular, local or “unerudite” knowledge be taken as a starting point and not just as something to be copied or studied in various projects? To what extent are projects, products, material goods and services actually accessible in places that lack original solutions?
