THE CITY
The congress will be held in Recife, the capital city of the State of Pernambuco.
Over the decades, Recife has developed a singular trajectory that connects design, technology, and critical thinking. From the pioneering experiences of Gráfico Amador in the early 20th century to the creation of UFPE’s Industrial Design program in 1972, the city built a solid academic tradition in design. In the 1990s, the founding of CESAR linked this university base with applied research and business innovation—a trajectory that was consolidated with the creation of CESAR School and its professional master’s program in design in 2018. This historical path transformed Recife into a territory conducive to investigations of design and technology that are attentive to local particularities that translate into global differentiators.
This trajectory is inscribed in direct dialogue with Recife’s cultural life, a city marked by the continuous invention of languages and rhythms. Expressions such as frevo, with its vibrant and pulsating choreography, maracatu, with its pulsating and symbolic beats deeply rooted, and manguebeat, which articulated tradition, social critique, and aesthetic experimentation, reveal a culture oriented by hybridity, reinvention, and the capacity to transform adversity into creative power. Between “rivers, bridges, and overdrives,” carnival and revolution, Recife has built an imaginary in which culture, memory, and resistance intertwine, affirming the city as a living, plural territory in permanent motion.
Vista dos prédios históricos do Marco Zero do Recife
Over time, Recife has built its identity from multiple cultural layers that coexist and create tensions in the city’s everyday life. The Afro-Indigenous heritage and popular culture in the fabric of contemporary urban practices evoke new collective ways of occupying space, shaping a territory marked by invention that transgresses through resistance and shared creation. Its festivities, symbolic expressions of local narratives, reveal a city that continuously remakes itself through life in common, without erasing conflicts or silencing memories. It is this “being a city,” cut through by rivers and connected by bridges—like an immense, pulsating, powerful heart—that makes Recife a living cultural territory, capable of sustaining multiple temporalities and ways of existing.
