X SDS 2025 - Simpósio de Design Sustentável

The tenth SDS – Sustainable Design Symposium + Sustainable Design Symposium will be the first edition of this renowned and consolidated event in our area to be held in the Legal Amazon, a region to which the eyes of the world are directed. The event will be held exactly after the 30th UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) that will take place in Belém. How does the field of Design respond to climate change, which  is a profound reflection of an unprecedented impact, of which we are a part? How we think about solutions to mitigate the impacts of the Anthropocene (Creutzen; Stroemer, 2000; Noronha; Furtado, 2021), which we can also name Capitalocene (Haraway, 2021: Preciado, 2023), considering that the field of design has always been linked to unsustainable practices, such as extractivism, planned obsolescence, and waste generation (Wright Mills, 2010; Fry, 2020)? It is in this moment of emergency that we invite everyone to think <span style="font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-color: transparent; font-weight: 700; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">where worlds to come Through other designs and new ways of thinking about and carrying out sustainability in projects?

Our thematic call for debate is based on discussions critical of the Anthropocene and dialogues with the book Are there worlds to come? (2021) by Brazilian scientists Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The authors bring the awareness that the grandiose project de "construction of reality" took place in the form of the natural destruction of the planet, raising an anguish about an idea about the "end of the world". Our answer to the authors' unsettling question is that yes, there is worlds to come, as long as we redirect the route of research in design and sustainability in a critical and reflective way. In addition to the classic division of the concept of sustainability, for pedagogical purposes, based on three dimensions: economic, environmental and social (Manzini and Vezzolli, 2008), we call on the Brazilian and international design communities, especially Latin American, to complexify their thinking on the subject, thinking about these dimensions in an imbricated and inseparable way, apprehending new ways of being with nature and be nature. We invite the deepening of research in design with more than humans, thinking about biomaterials, economies and territories, leading to the search for an ontological design, as proposed by Arturo Escobar, in his book Diseño y autonomia (2016), engaging us with cosmovisions other, with social movements linked to the land, indigenous peoples, riverside dwellers, collecting communities and quilombolas, but not only: with animals, plants and minerals. 

We call for reflections on the impacts of <span style="font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">industrial mass production, the life cycle of products, new consumption behaviors for sustainability, the processes of dematerialization of design expanding the approaches to creating services, the energy transition and its impacts on industrial production. We are facing a paradigm shift and we need to reposition ourselves as a field of knowledge that has traditionally been linked to industrial production. 

Rather than being a limiter to academic production, the thematic call is an invitation to the presence of voices, dreams, stories, materials, materialities and technologies to reimagine this world in several others, so that together we can think about the pluriverse (Escobar, 2016). We propose a critical debate on the multidimensional issues of sustainability, involving the political dimension, issues related to the world of work, gender cuts, post-extractivist debates, production and consumption behaviors, the poetics and aesthetics that promote and embody this discussion.