MDGPE Project Exhibition 2025–26
October 2 to 9, 2026 Museum Gallery, FBAUP
Opening: October 2, 17:00
Design on the Threshold of the Post-Agentic Era
The opening of the 3rd annual exhibition of the Master’s in Graphic Design and Editorial Projects (MDGPE), held on October 2, 2026, at the Museum Gallery of FBAUP, became a vital gathering space for our community: practitioners and students; faculty and researchers alongside alumni and friends. The exhibition showcases the outcomes of the past academic year, reflecting the critical laboratory through which students investigated material and digital ecosystems.
This year’s overarching theme reclaims the somatic and tactile experience—embodied design—demonstrating that editorial design also emerges from intentional deceleration, inviting audiences to experience communication artifacts holistically.
The opening session was attended by the Dean of the Faculty, Professor Miguel Carvalhais (also counted with the presence of the Head of the Design Department, Professor Bruno Giesteira); the program’s Scientific Committee; and the exhibition’s student-led organizing and production team responsible for the visual identity, communication, and gallery build.
Student engagement was overwhelming: the first-year cohort attended en masse, joined by the always so dedicated main core of the “usual suspects” from the graduating second-year master’s students. Many soon to present and defend their projects!
Equally gratifying was the substantial presence of undergraduate Communication Design students, alongside the enthusiastic return of numerous alumni, colleagues from partner institutions, and active design professionals. Having already entered industry practice, so many alumni returned to reconnect (on hopes!) with the school, measure the pulse of contemporary editorial production, and support their peers (this one was obvious due to so many heartfelt compliments and warm conversations!). It was a shared celebration during which the visual identity and exhibition layout drew unanimous praise for their ingenuity, tactile experience promotion, and resourceful paper selection.
The Inevitability of an Historical Transition
We inhabit a singular moment: an algorithmic present confronting an autocratic, dystopian, and almost Neuromancer-esque horizon that portends the erosion of human touch and unmediated interaction. This is the crossroads we occupy today—the threshold of a structural paradigm shift. Years from now, we will likely look back upon this group of students and processes that gave birth to these artifacts not with nostalgic yearning, but with pride and joy, recognizing them as one of the last generations to work directly through the manual techniques and physical substrates where the graphic designer was, first and foremost, a hands-on maker.
The consolidation of Material Archive exhibition [and also the statement it makes] occurs at a decisive turning point for our discipline. Very soon, the specific medium and traditional methods of manual execution will become secondary—except, perhaps, for their aesthetic, sensory, and hedonic value.
Don’t miss-interpret these words—as with physical exercise, or fundamental education—learning, knowing, experimenting, repeating basic / fundamental techniques is mandatory for any knowledge or skill acquisition. In an education context, being it in a higher education context, undergraduate, graduate, or post graduate level, is no different. Knowledge, or deep knowledge, critically grounded, and the expertise derives from practice. From repetition. It needs time and experience. Envolving the senses and the whole body makes it even (potentially) a more rich and complete experience. This is something automation is threatneing and we should be aware a design preemptive measures to address and take advantage from the emerging technologies. But the future with automation, brighter or darker, seems now an innescapable innevitability.
In celebrating the printed artifacts produced throughout 2025/2026, we do not wish retreat into nostalgic escapism. On the contrary, we affirm that somatic experience, physical resistance, and direct workshop practice remain an indispensable pedagogical foundation for design education. Knowing how to construct with one’s hands remains the bedrock for critical inquiry.
Yet the oncoming technological shift is relentless. As David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails, observed upon announcing his retirement from manual coding after twenty-five years of practice: writing code by hand will soon cease to be a commercially viable endeavor. [~39mins]
The historical parallel to graphic design is immediate and clarifying.
When letterpress printing collapsed commercially in Portugal during the mid-1980s amid the rise of phototypesetting and the digital computer, movable metal type did not vanish; it was recontextualized. It migrated from industrial, low-cost utility into the deliberate realm of the Fine Press [despite this change was more evident in countries like the USA, UK, Germany, and even France], physical material research, and projects of high cultural, tactile, and authorial value.
Today, we face the same impending obsolescence across routine graphic software execution. Conventional desktop publishing workflows—from WYSIWYG interfaces to automated layout—are being absorbed by autonomous agents and open contextual architectures, such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) capabilities that allow to connect LLMs and GenAi Agents to existin tools and services.
Proprietary, closed software silos and labor-intensive manual workflows anchored in corporate software monopolies will inevitably lose economic viability. Simultaneously, we are witnessing unprecedented democratization: lowered technical barriers and distributed computation already empower designers to build bespoke tools, predominantly deployed as lightweight, shareable web applications.
As previously posited [Design OBS 3rd conference at FBAUL; Up Arte 4], the browser has firmly established itself as the “new paper“. The new and “best preferred communication medium”. With the convergence of agentic models and open standards, designers will no longer operate as captive consumers of static interfaces; they will design their own bespoke instruments on the medium itself, plugins, parametric filters, and production pipelines in existing WYSIWYG (the ones that allow sripting in, ro to connect to them, at least) and the best of all, to design and develop tailor-made custom tools to each specific project and work method. And these will be the best tools. The most productive. And they will make us super-human.
The Designer as Post-Agentic Vormgever
Under this emergent paradigm, routine technical execution—where the cost of repetitive labor drops virtually to zero—Graphic Deisgn as we know it will no longer be a sustainable/viable commercial endeavor. At least as a standalone profession as we know it today. The investment of human handiwork will be reserved for artifacts of exceptional cultural import, where tactile presence, editorial curation, and deliberate materiality convey ethical and sensory weight that automated synthesis cannot match. This is where the enduring value of the designer will reside.
Beyond that tactile sanctuary, the designer fully assumes the condition of the Vormgever (the form-giver, in the profound tradition of Dutch design terminology). No longer a specialized operator [AKA labor-slave operator] of discrete software applications, the designer operates as a holistic conductor [AKA maestro] of concepts, data, structures, and materials—giving shape to experiences through radical automation and digital fabrication.
While the unbridled acceleration of algorithmic systems threatens to erase alterity—flattening difference, dissent, and cultural nuance under standardized data models—designers now occupy an unprecedented vantage point. Leveraging these very agentic technologies, this generation will be the first with the agency to construct the computational tools required to reclaim epistemic sovereignty, beyind any single person or team’s technical reach. Hopefully, freeing enough [human] time and effort to pursue the themes, topics, problems that need solving. The ones that are important. the ones that restore the sense of diversity, complexity and cultural richness of the human experience. And not the other way around. One hopes, at least! 😉
This is where the Faculty of Fine Arts and the MDGPE reaffirm their pedagogical mission. The academy does not train technicians for ephemeral corporate interfaces; it aims to educate critical authors and professionals equipped to interrogate technical systems, negotiate alterity, and address human experience across its full somatic and political spectrum.
Material Archive documents this exact threshold moment: a clear-eyed preparation for the post-agentic editorial landscape.
Ultimately, these exhibited projects embody a conscious resistance to hyper-automation: a deliberate return to deceleration, tactile weight, quietude, distance, and contemplation. They compel the hand to fold paper, the fingers to turn pages, and the human body to adopt a rhythm that pauses before a sensory, unpredictable artifact.
We invite you to read the exhibition room sheet, visit the physical gallery at the FBAUP Museum (on view through October 9), and explore the interactive digital archive and relational network visualization on the official MDGPE website.
On behalf of the team that put this together, we hope you enjoy this exhibition.
Pedro Amado
Director of the Master’s in Graphic Design and Editorial Projects