Christian Guellerin

The first designers emerged during the 19th century’s industrial revolution. They were faced with the challenge of rediscovering the values of artist and craftsman’s work, while striving for mass production. They were probably looking for the humanity of those values, the conscience of good work, the principles of “a beautiful piece of artwork”. Industry offered a new field of creative application. Whereas artists created objects, designers created products.
What is a product? When referring to production economics, the product is the result of an industrial process. From a market economy point of view, the product is one of the elements that make up the marketing-mix, and that has been manufactured to satisfy a need. Design‘s function is therefore to make products sell.
The notion of product clearly falls into the field of economics. Yet, design schools hardly admit the discipline’s relation to this field. What does design bring to economy? What does the relation between design and economy imply? What does this lack of recognition of the economic role of design reveal?

Designers task is to come up with more useful, more functional and more beautiful products. Those creations should also provide better services, be more ergonomic and easier to use. They even should sometimes display a form, an image or a reasoning, which evokes a sense of pleasure in its user and facilitates its appropriation. By rationalizing production methods or by increasing the sales of products, design favours added value and thus profit for companies. Then we shall assume that design is the “henchman of profit and capitalism”. What a deception for creators who thought design to be ethical and humanitarian! They are confronted with scornful criticism and suspicions of perversion, lies and superfluity.

The economic issue seems to be even more disturbing for higher education institutions (especially European). It is not only because they’re not at ease with “compromising” creation with the production of added value and benefits; admitting the relation of design with capitalistic economy, based on the doctrine of self-enrichment is also a moral problem for those institutions.
If perceiving the adventure of capitalism is perceived as being not very moral since it allows the rich to become even more so and the poor to remain so forever, design not only stops to be ethical, but even more so becomes perverted by economics. This ambiguity is even more accentuated when companies use design as a cultural or ethical banner to sell their image and products. Design is thus an excuse for an intention, which is difficult to admit. How can we then reconcile design and capitalistic economy?

Let’s reconsider the designer’s role. His economic responsibility prevails in that it reaches beyond the market, beyond requirements and beyond demand. Designers have the power and the duty to produce offer. They must make sure that this offer is fruitful and promotes progress, since human beings and uses are central to their reflection. Designers create wealth and must strive towards a progress-dedicated economy. Their objectives are above all progress, comfort and happiness, and should not be mixed up with those of the company employing him. He should not forbid himself to generate, on the contrary. Profit becomes a means… and the market offers opportunities of exchange. How fortunate to be able to spread that which is good! The market will reflect back to the designer the recognition of his work, as well as its justification. Designers’ place and responsibility in the system is therefore to add an ethical dimension to companies.

By placing mankind at the heart of their strivings, the designer is in charge of replacing economic-driven reasoning with humanitarian reasoning. Profit hence only becomes a means and the designer becomes the key person of an “ethical company”. What a beautiful vision of the craft the schools could diffuse!

[ Lire → ]

What is the mission of a design school?
To fix a strategy, the manager has the responsibility to never forget the role of the organisation he leads. Therefore, as the director of L’Ecole de design Nantes Atlantique I have to consider the role of this kind of academic institution. What is a school of Design? Is it a centre of creation, an education centre, a business centre for new products, a research centre or perhaps a wonderful place to invent tomorrow? All those questions may be answered in the affirmative, as the issue is complex. Schools of design are all that and hopefully more….
Once we have defined this role and the goals we try to achieve, we can determine the ways to get there: how we organize the whole academic program and structures. Let me present you the strategic choices of L’Ecole de design Nantes Atlantique.

We consider that we have two major goals: to promote industrial design as an economic matter and to teach the students to become good creators.
We have to promote design in the companies and the economic fields. Creation and innovation are an economic matter as they generate added values for products and companies. This should place them at the heart of production, marketing and management. In France, the place of industrial design in companies has been limited because of the supremacy of applied arts and the mistrust within the economy. Most people concerned with design still think we are teaching to artists and feel that design is still reserved for furniture, interior decoration, or recently multimedia.
To teach design is our second goal, the one for which we are paid. We have to teach the students to become good creators. We have the responsibility to place our students in design jobs, to help them to work as designers, in good positions, with decent salaries, with good perspectives for careers. These are the conditions, which reunited allow creation to flourish.

Multiply ways to approach companies
To pursue these two goals, we have different options. Among them two appear as the most important:
- First of all, our current academic programs are all organised around professional projects dealing with industrial and commercial companies. That represents about 30 to 40 projects per year. First, the Faculty, the teachers and the designers define the academic program. It is aimed to guarantee the development of knowledge and to ensure that the main trends of the moment are worked on. Then the school looks for partnerships with companies. They are involved from the beginning to the end of the curriculum. Some companies have already approached design, others have not and need to be informed about it; this is exactly the variety of situations the students will be faced with throughout their careers.
- The second way to achieve our goals is related to the five-year program. This level leads to a diploma, which is awarded to students by a jury after evaluating two mandatory steps: a final project and a training period accomplished in a company or an agency at the end of the curriculum. This last step was recently introduced in the program and is a major change. The mission of the jury is to assess if the student is ready to become a professional designer, not if he is a good creator.
Paradoxically, despite our will to collaborate with companies, we are still suspicious of national or international competitions. The reason is that the professional approach, that is to say working with teams or professionals, is often absent from these types of competitions. They often simply aim to collect good ideas in return for pocket money.

What are the ways to develop in the coming years?
At L’Ecole de design we are working on two major ways to develop our expertise in Design.
- First, we plan to create real research departments financed by public and private funds which will work with companies on long term plans, like the engineering schools do.
- We are developing courses for professionals in design, creativity and management for executives or people coming from other fields, to make them aware of the opportunities and responsibilities of creation in all economic fields. We have just opened a post-graduate program on design management with Audencia (a school of management in Nantes).
In France, most of the managers come from formal sciences fields. We think managers from now on should be men and women aware of human resources and creativity, incorporating intuition in their approach. Designers suit those characteristics well. Our role is to prepare the managers of tomorrow. Engineers give us the opportunity to be « high tech », whereas designers create the generation of « high touch » management.

L’École de Design Nantes Atlantique has undergone an important development during the last couple of years. At present our school is supported by the French Ministry of Higher Education and also by various cultural and economic structures, such as “Chamber of Commerce”, the Ministry of Industry, the “Region des Pays de la Loire”…
This school is very much invested in the economic and cultural network of the area. Its driving force is based on one fundamental value: to give its students the opportunity to learn and create, while ensuring that they can make a livelihood and find enjoyment in the process of creation. Our work does not consist of developing schools. It consists of expanding the horizon of the students we are training. Only our students count: their success is ours.

[ Lire → ]