He has a multifaceted career as a designer, collector, curator and teacher. Parra has developed projects in the areas of Product Design, Strategic and Trend Design, Communication and Interface Design, Transport and Architecture Design.

As a professor, he was Director of the Department of Industrial Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lisbon by which has a PhD in Design, and was also Coordinator of Design in other institutions of higher education, including the University of Évora, ESAD Matosinhos and IADE in Lisbon.

Since 1988 has regularly published books and articles on design and constituted a collection of Industrial Design, he also directed the Museum of Design – MADE.