Tongji University has brought together in Shanghai the most eminent international experts in design and architecture in order to reflect upon the theme of « better cities, better life. » This theme is at the heart of designers’ concerns, and is central to most of our curriculum and research activities. How and where will we [...]
25 August 2010
Better cities, better life – Tongji Shangai – Cumulus – September 2010
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24 February 2010
degrees, what degrees ? / Diplôme, quel diplôme ?
Degree holders are used to saying they graduated in such or such city or school: Helsinki, London, Milan… But will this still make sense in the near future? Will it still make sense to say this for students who spent 2 semesters in London, 1 in Helsinki, 1 in Milan, and finally obtained a degree [...]
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5 February 2010
Best wishes for 2010
http://www.cumulusassociation.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=597&Itemid=35
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13 January 2010
Bringing ethics back into entrepreneurship?
The Copenhagen summit only led to a stalemate: politicians failed to enforce development management laws. However, a global political consciousness came to life during this international meeting and many rivalries between States were smoothed out.
But will this make capitalism into a virtuous system? Of course it won’t! As a “techno-scientific” system capitalism fundamentally lacks an [...]
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7 January 2010
Designing after Copenhagen
2009 will remain a landmark in the 21st century. Two significant facts seem to foreshadow the birth of a new world; two events that could give us the creeps were we not “designers,” professionals forced to play Sysiphus, to keep building and rebuilding our environment on a daily basis. All the paradigms ruling industrial development [...]
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14 December 2009
New contexts for school of design
The environment of design schools – and of all higher education institutions – has greatly evolved over the past few years. Among all these significant mutations, 4 seem to prevail:
1/ The “globalization” of social and economic issues. Already implemented in more than 70 countries to enable institutions to open their curriculums to foreign students, [...]
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6 November 2009
To an “intuitic” thinking
Designers have become project managers. Though they are still primarily valued for their creative and technical skills – which are in itself a language – in the course of time designers have taken on other kinds of responsibility – such as being in a position to bringing together philosophers, sociologists, engineers, technicians, marketers, financial people, [...]
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28 October 2009
Design and research
I have recently given a lecture at the symposium organized by the IASDR – “International Association of Societies of Design Research” 2009* – a research-oriented conference presenting the work of a large number of researchers and
universities from all over the world. First we should congratulate the organizers of the event for gathering so many different [...]
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14 October 2009
Business needs Design
Because they have always considered business administration and management as mere business sciences based on analytical thinking; because they have always relied on research and its seriousness; because they have always strived to rationalize, codify and analyze the past to retrieve the sacrosanct “dogma” – in this field, no salvation without dogma, it seems – [...]
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14 October 2009
Design schools/Business schools
This morning I was solicited by concerned parents: they were wondering if their still undecided child should rather enroll in a design school or a business school. I told them that after a five-year training in design, as a young graduate you possessed the resources to develop a solid marketing-and-management culture within a year or [...]
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