ABSTRACT
The main goal of this chapter is to present a decolonial perspective on the rise of design education in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s, here encompassing both the economic and cultural aspects of its formation. The economic side arises from the roots of the Brazilian design discourse on the developmental and industrialist ideologies in national development politics before and after the 1964 military coup, presented here as Eurocentric paradigms in countries from colonial backgrounds. The cultural side is also presented as colonial heritage, arising from colonised subjectivities permeated by the ideology of modernisation, Europeanisation and the domestication of native and Afro-diasporic narratives and ways of being, knowing and doing. In this sense, the roots of design education are reviewed at the intersection of economic, social and cultural dynamics in Brazil through a bibliographic study on decolonial thought in Latin America and other contributions from the Global South, going from dependency theory to studies on alternatives to development by the Permanent Working Group on Alternatives to Development founded by Miriam Lang, acknowledging the inseparable and transdisciplinary nature of this phenomenon and its economic and cultural elements.
