Posts Tagged ‘education’

A sad state of affairs

ensaama

Last week, I have attended the 50th anniversary of the Creation Industrielle departement of Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Appliques et Metiers d’ Art in Paris – the first design school I have studied back in the last century. Sadly, everything is still in the last century from education to facilities to organization. For those of you that are not familiar with the French education system, it is free. And that’s the problem. How can you compete in an international market with no budget?

The students are smart and they have potential but they are being ripped off.
They are being ripped off by a mafia of teachers that have been there forever and are totally out of touch of today’s needs and skills;
They are being ripped off by the French Education ministry, which is not enabling its most valuable resources to be competitive in a global market;
They are being ripped off by the French design industry (if that exists) for not pressuring design schools to change their curriculum to meet today’s needs.

French design education needs to change from a “star designer” mindset and craft skills training to a multi-diciplinary user-centered design process and entrepreneurship/leadership mindset.

Back to the event. Note to the organizer. When you gather 500 alumini that have graduated from 1956 to today, the least you can do to give people name tags to facilitate discussions. Isn’t the point of such event to get people to “meet” and do business together? Obviously it was not. Instead, they decided to give us a 1-hour lecture on French design! FFS. Luckily Anne Asensio (Director of Advanced Design at GM) gave a rather inspiring concluding 15 minutes talk, which was really difficult to hear due to the poor acoustic of the hall…

Concluding thoughts? After attending several events at UIAH in Helsinki and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, I can’t help thinking that French design education and schools are obsolete.

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The not-so-visible influence of Education

Earlier this year, Sir Ken Robinson gave an interesting talk at TED about education and creativity. His thesis is simple: creativity is as important as literacy, yet all modern education systems are educating kids out of creativity by focusing on their heads, and slightly to one side, with Sciences/Literature and neglecting the Arts especially drama and dance.

concert

Earlier this month, I went to a KCRW concert at the California Plaza in Downtown Los Angeles. For those that are not familiar with the place, it’s just a plaza with a fountain and a few shops. Anyway, I noticed that half of the space, and all of the VIP, was covered with chairs. Why is that? It is an ad-hoc music performance; people should be able to dance? No? Then I realised that most of our infrastructure is designed, consciously or not, to inhibit people to express themselves with their body. Think about for a second. Chairs should be there to allow people to rest, not to prohibit them to dance. Thankfully, people’s primitive instincts take over after some time, one stands up and starts dancing while the others are like @%#^$@^, but then 2, 3, 4, 10, etc follow. When enough people are dancing, they start to rearrange the space by pushing the chairs around. We have all witness this. We all know this.

This one obvious example and I am sure they are many others, but it made me realised how far my/our education reaches. What would the world look like if the Arts were the primary focus of education?

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