Christian Guellerin

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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- Green Economy Company 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) Not one company in the capitalist system has ever sold a product out of duty, but always out of interest. [...]

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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. For the past [...]

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“This would be an interesting segue into the “brand of me” culture that we live in, where it is not about design, as much as it is me! And what I am presenting to the world as what represents me! – and that junk can be made by third world workers any place on the [...]

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Cumulus goes on growing in a design friendly context that makes the design definitely pertinent. The schools of design will have to evolve and to adapt to these new contexts if they want to be the key-actors in higher education, what they have the opportunity to become. Part 1/ a design-friendly context: – a context [...]

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Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook, etc. All are leading the way in a radical change in the relationships among the market, consumers and goods and services providers. Emerging from it is a new kind of marketing resulting from the rising presence of customers, who are, in turn, becoming more visible in the design of the products they [...]

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