Pixel International Conferences

Design is an activity with the ability to creatively engage with other fields in its education process. As an active agent in communication and society, it must assume a role of responsible citizenship, contributing with its actions to improve its contexts and its communities of intervention. The following paper develops the research of design education between past and future, starting from a global outlook that deals with methods, strategies and creativity, and copes with new and more complex challenges and work forms, and describing pedagogical actions in higher education in Design, in Portugal, focused on heritage preservation in order to achieve these goals. As a pedagogical field that extends beyond visual mediation, it acknowledges and promotes alternative expressions of knowledge, addressing possible design roles in terms of overall cultural change, and in particular in the case studies presented in the paper, towards local heritage preservation. The successful implementation of this bridge also brings more cognitive maturity do students, combined with a deeper understanding of pedagogical processes in general, providing an accentuated view of the role of design, and learning process built with the understanding of the world and of real issues. It focuses in a teaching-learning-research bias, focused on heritage preservation identities, traditions, and systems of knowledge, establishing a mediation pedagogy that opened up territories for further expansion of theory and practice.

Keywords: higher education, cultural change, heritage.