ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I examine a pivotal moment in design history in the 1960s and 1970s when modern design education and discourse became institutionalized in Brazil. Rather than investigating the history of modern design, however, I propose a theoretical approach through decolonial thinking that reframes and critiques the institutionalization of modern design as displacement. Drawing on Roberto Schwarz’s “misplaced ideas,” an influential theoretical framework that upholds colonial paradigms of development, I discuss its limitations for current debates in design. I consider the professional ethos of two practitioners acting in Brazil from the 1960s onward, Alexandre Wollner and Lina Bo Bardi. My discussion of their diverging visions for design and ways of designing, their lived experience as designers who have crossed intellectual and praxis borders, and their capacity to establish relationality with their places of practice are underpinned by the work of historians of colonial formation and decolonial thinkers. I conclude by proposing that it is by studying borders and their displacements, not as fixed lines but as lines of negotiations, that design historians will reclaim other knowledges.
