Design activities and designed artifacts have been at the core of developmentalist efforts to modernize Latin America and Brazil, in particular. You just need to think of Brasilia—Brazil’s modernist capital built in the desert over three years thanks to a colossal amount of manual labour and human cost—to associate nation building, infrastructural improvement and economic development with the design and architectural professions. This linkage, however, is still underexplored in design history.

My current research project examines modern design as a particular pedagogy in design training, as a professionalized activity, and as graphic and industrial design forms used to communicate progress, which became dominant in Brazil between the 1960s and 1970s. I study modern design formation through the installation of specialist design schools, professional bodies, national industrialization and modernization policies and transnational exchange with design and cultural institutions in Argentina, Chile, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, and United States.

A recent project and publication, for example, explored the first International Industrial Design Biennial held in Latin America in 1968. Then, Brazilian design students mounted a protest exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio, where the Biennial occurred, to expose authoritarianism, curriculum inadequacies and cultural dependency in design. Besides being interested in the linkages between nation building efforts and modern design, I am particularly attracted by the fact that national development and design development happened in tandem in Latin American under the aegis of brutal military dictatorships. Why and how is modern design associated to the rise of of authoritarian cultures, is one of the key questions I have been pursuing.