What do we Lack?

The urgency in the discussion and formulation of concrete proposals in face of the current economic system’s incompatibility and of the preservation of the planet requires a careful observation of our lifestyle.
It is not about just respecting the future generations anymore, ensuring the same use of material and natural assets we had the right to, but about a search for new actions and thinking models. We would have already had a curious inversion of values, when changing the focus: And what if the development degree of the countries were measured not by the industrialization index and the GDP, but by the production of solid residues, pollution and energy consumption? Architect Bernard Rudofsky suggested us that if we opened our eyes a little wider than their accustomed aperture, if we could observe without ethnic bias, we would look at our own environment with a more critical awareness.
Considering the Brazilian reality, anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, defined that the opening of our horizons will only occur: “when we prohibit the past and present of forming the future corresponding to its being and its bias. We shall only accomplish our own potentialities by projecting ourselves the future we want. This will only occur when we develop lifestyles and ways of consumption which are not governed by profit, but fundamentally intended to answer the needs of our population.”
The design represents a relevant role in the promotion of this change, overall when we consider that it deals with satisfaction of the needs of the body and spirit. In this sense, the question is not what is still to be designed or redesigned, but what do we lack?
In academic experiences and pedagogic practices involving Design students with a local context of poverty and exclusion, the emerging problems and issues reveal us that there is still much to be accomplished. One of the first aspects is the insertion of excluded or marginalized populations in a social equity and visibility level. In many cases, the very notion of community must be rethought, for its territorial occupation, many times, does not record traces of memory, belonging and voice. “I” is almost inexistent. "Us” is unknown.
Talking about a sustainable planet requires the existence of an actual collective, marked by continued actions, by the involvement of the civil and governmental organizations, without the weight of assistencialism or indifference. The work of Victor Papanek, Alain Findeli, Bernard Rudofsky, among others, contains a historic legacy and a broad critical debate indicating the crucial insertion of the design in the construction of such common future. This is what many of us, design students throughout the world, long for.

(Tatiana Sakurai ; Maria Cecília Loschiavo dos Santos)