Table of Contents and Editorial

Abstract

Visions of the Future: Iberian Visual Culture After Democracy, 1974–1998 is a collaborative research project examining the role of visual communication in the Iberian Peninsula during its transition to democracy in the final decades of the twentieth century. Anchored in the research units DESIGN ID (Universidade Lusófona, Lisbon) and GREDITS (BAU, Centro Universitario de Artes y Diseño de Barcelona), and operating as a pilot initiative of the Iberian Design Archives network, the project brings together researchers and institutions across Portugal and Spain in the shared conviction that this period’s graphic and visual legacy has been incompletely archived and insufficiently understood. Its methodological commitment is to read the design archive not as a fixed historical sequence, but as an open and contested field — one still in transition.

The inaugural conference of Visions of the Future, organised by MUDE – Museu do Design in co-organisation with COFAC and with the support of the Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, of-fered a first occasion to test that commitment collectively. It was, above all, an encounter: a gathering of researchers, practitioners, and institutions who, arriving from different disciplines and national contexts, recognised in one anoth-er a common preoccupation. Visual culture as political evi-dence. The design archive as a site of memory and omission. Democratic transition not as a concluded historical episode, but as an ongoing and unfinished process. The papers col-lected in this publication are the written trace of that encoun-ter — and of the conversations it made possible.