a designer at the end of… glamour
23 > 24 JUNE 2026 I MUDE – MUSEU DO DESIGN
A Designer at the End of… Glamour
Showcase of Final-Year Communication Design Students, 2025/26
23-24 JUNE 2026, 10am-7pm, space kindly made available by MUDE – Museu do Design.
The expression ‘A designer at the end of…’ can be understood as a revisit of the postmodernist rhetoric proclaiming ‘the end of everything’. Used as an acknowledgement of the profound changes currently unfolding, we can also view ‘the end of everything’ as an effective communication strategy—precisely because it is so compelling.
Taking as their motto a set of words that function as variations on the phrase ‘A Designer at the End of…’, the graduating students of the Bachelor’s degree in Communication Design (2025/26) addressed the current challenges facing the discipline’s culture, without losing sight of the designer’s role as a citizen of a world in crisis, filled with “ends” of across various times, geographies and events, amid shifting currents of optimism and pessimism.
A Designer at the End of Glamour was the theme proposed by the students responsible for this showcase. Glamour is an impression that intensifies reality, sustained by what is never fully revealed. It is not limited to objects: it is a mechanism, a process, and a promise. In design, glamour operates through both the practice and the practitioner. In practice, it contributes to the creation of artifacts, images, narratives, and experiences capable of evoking emotions and projecting worldviews. Design processes centers in the selection, filtering, and intensification of this reality. For the practitioner, glamour creates the perception of a particular and recognizable status, which influences how designers see themselves and are recognized by others—it constructs an idealized image of the profession. We thus propose to understand how glamour operates in design through a three-phase cycle—seduction, system, and lucidity—to which the various projects of the graduating students are associated.
These projects, which reflect on the end of an era—which also marks the beginning of other futures—embrace a restless critical mindset and a practice that seeks to be socially and culturally engaged. In doing so, they explore the possibility of a discipline that can contribute to the fundamental connection between the young designer and their interpretation of reality.
Organization: Department of Communication Design