Christian Guellerin

21 proposals have just been made to promote design, by the “European Design Leadership Board.” Finally, the European Commission seems to have become aware of the issues at stake. The European Commission has just published a small book presented in Helsinki on September 17th, 2012, which is the result of a study carried out by [...]

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Western economies are looking for a new life, a new impulse. If States are now looking at ways of containing the debt crisis, of saving banks from bankruptcy, it is in the field of business and competitiveness that everything will unravel. Globalization and the competition of emerging economies have led to a complete economical reorganisation and as Adam Smith would have said, has led to a new era of the “division of labour.”

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In a context of international competition, where companies are not on equal footing, total quality management policies must give way to innovation abilities, where people reach beyond a given framework and imposed processes. The entrepreneur manager, the designer manager is taking over the administrator manager.

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Western businesses may soon be in an outward-bound predicament in order to bridge the gap with booming markets abroad. It has now become urgent that they equip themselves with the necessary manufacturing operations enabling them to sell to the Chinese, Indians and Brazilians, and come tomorrow, owing to a growing economy, to those of the dawning middle class in certain African countries.

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Economic and industrial models are crumbling away. Economists everywhere seem incapable of predicting or solving problems facing Western countries. The reality is that universities of economics, recently recognized by the Shanghai ranking for the quality of their research, have not produced the “finders” who, alongside researchers, are expected to provide solutions to calm down the stormy seas that lie ahead.

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Given the turbulent socio-economic climate, the number of remarkable opportunities awaiting design schools is not only impressive, involving the training of students who will occupy tomorrow’s top managerial roles, but also commensurate with innovation challenges facing businesses and society on the whole.

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Interview for a magazine of Education

Christian Guellerin has been the director of the Ecole de design Nantes Atlantique for 13 years. This former head of a business school, who has also worked at the Chamber of Commerce of Nantes/St Nazaire, has established a spirit of management and entrepreneurship within his design school – a complete turn around for this industrial design school created 20 years ago.

How can someone who is not a designer with a background in business run a successful design school?

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Students used to enroll in design schools mostly, if not solely, to acquire technical skills. And we have to recognize that in times past students were evaluated only on their technical skills. But this time is over : now studying design is a true way to engage in a long term career as a creative professional in the service of innovation, users and development.

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Companies’ virtues leave little to be desired, meaning that their policies end up legislating on their behalf with regard to ecology and green economy issues. (Globalization flies in the face of green)
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“It is no longer about improving even more on what we already know how to do, but about doing something else with what we know how to do.” I like this idea. The emergence of newly-industrialized, cheap labor countries has wreaked pure havoc on those industrial paradigms upon which economies were founded.

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