IED São Paulo

The Brazilian chapter of the Istituto Europeo di Design opened in São Paulo in 2005, the first IED campus outside Europe and the start of the group’s activity in the country. The school occupies a building in Higienópolis, close to the city’s main cultural circuits, and presents itself as the only international faculty in Brazil dedicated entirely to design.

Teaching is divided into five nuclei — fashion, management and business, visual arts and communication, product and technology, and spaces and interiors — and disciplines are planned by market professionals and revised as the sector changes. The method joins knowing, knowing how to do and being: practical application is the complement of theory, not a substitute for it.

The offer runs from undergraduate degrees and three-year courses to postgraduate programmes, master’s degrees and a lifelong learning strand of one-year courses, extension courses and workshops. Classes are project-based, and the campus opens to the city with cultural programming that positions design as a tool of transformation.

Students work with the Luciano Devià library and with the wider IED Brasil structure, which includes the Rio de Janeiro campus opened in 2014 at the Cassino da Urca. The institution holds the Selo Instituição Socialmente Responsável from ABMES and belongs to a network teaching 10,000 students a year.