It was a great pleasure to take part in the sixth “Les Ateliers de la Recherche en Design” in Paris although my lack of knowledge in French no doubt got in the way. The meeting was held in Univesité Paris 1 Center Saint Charles on Thursday and in Parson Paris School of Art & Design on Friday. The meeting language was in French except for the two sessions on Friday in which international researchers spoke. Despite the language barrier, I was impressed to see how our French colleagues pushing the design resesarch agenda within their communities. The Finnish government, according to Pekka Korvenmaa, has been investing 700 million euros in design research and education. Unlike the counterparts in Finland, design researchers in France and my homebase Germany have to struggle on their own to bring design research to the level of international excellence. I honestly admire these efforts.
I, as the manager of DRNetwork, participated in the roundtable discussion, together with Seymour Roworth Stokes (DRS), Pekka Korvenmaa (University of Art & Design Helsinki), Tom Inns (University of Dundee) and Stephane Laurent (Dubai). The organisors had chosen a fairly diverse group of speakers. Their aims, as Birgit Borja de Mozota humbly said, were to invite the French speaking communites to learn from other European experiences. Seymour opened the roundtable presentations. In a fairly formal way, he talked about the history and activities of DRS including their bi-annual conferences, Design Studies, Design Research Quarterly and Design Research News. Pekka talked about the envious development of design research in Finland, noted above. I described the activities of DRNetwork and more importantly encouraged the young to participate actively in driving design research forward. Tom talked of his experiences in organizing a 2.5 million research project in the UK and claimed that it is now exciting time to be involved in design research. Stephane mentioned that Dubai was now taking up design but still had much work to do to catch up on design research. Although it probably was not part of the intention of the meeting, as a listener to the discussions, I missed hearing more about the vision and future plans in design research.
On the way back to Berlin, I could not get my mind off the 700 million euros. I thought about the opportunities that they present, and the dangerous top-down pressure that might stifle creative work. I imagined the impact the Finnish move on other countries. I concluded that we must wish design researchers in Finland great success and prepare ourselves for the other 700 million euros to land on our desks.
Rosan