ESAD welcomes all students with a welcome session to kick off the 2023/24 academic year.
The session will take place on 25 September at 11:00 in ESAD's auditorium and will be hosted by ESAD's Board of Directors.
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WELCOME
A new school year begins and, with it, renewed expectations, challenges and possibilities. Helping you to achieve your goals, following what motivates you, is what motivates us. That's why ESAD is also renewing itself. As a current and active school, it has expanded its training offer, updated its equipment and planned a wide range of activities to accompany your academic year.
As a student at ESAD, you are at the center of the teaching-learning process. It is to ensure your success that the teachers dedicate themselves, helping you to acquire new knowledge and consolidate previous knowledge, celebrating successes with you, but without being afraid to value mistakes, which are constant possibilities for discovery and improvement. As a student at ESAD, you are at the center of an extraordinary community of creatives, artists, designers, researchers and innovative minds who, like you, think big in order to make things even bigger.
At ESAD, you'll find that classrooms are expanded, opening up horizons of learning, knowledge and experience, where sharing is part of success. We aim to help you become more attentive and considerate, to consolidate values, yours and ours, where diversity is respected, of people and other species, where inclusion is promoted, where empathy creates bridges and new forms of understanding and dialogue.
At the beginning of this academic year, in October, the biggest design event in Portugal will take place, the Porto Design Biennale, promoted by ESAD's research unit, esad-idea. The motto of this third edition is "Being Water", a theme that ties in with the central concerns about the planet and its resources, which guide one of the most important national education consortia, led by ESAD, the Blue Design Alliance. Not only the future, but also the present, is "liquid", fluid and dynamic, as seductive as it is challenging for artists and designers.
We are living at a time when a technological renewal, generated by artificial intelligence, is interfering in our social life in an alterative way, also affecting design, the arts and their teaching. Historically, artists and designers have never been afraid of the possibilities offered by new media and technologies, but they have always been, and must continue to be, aware that their use requires technical and critical skills and constant ethical attention.
To project is to launch an idea into the future that will be realized. It involves utopia and pragmatism. It also involves an important sense of responsibility, which comes from knowing that our activity will have a social, environmental and political impact. Sharing this sense of responsibility, you and I, is a fundamental principle.
No less fundamental, at this time when we welcome you to your school and to your community - ESAD - is the wish that your enthusiasm infects and is infected by ours and that together, we all come closer to achieving everything we have envisioned.
ESAD Directors