A notebook about design projects and provocations written by Raphael Grignani in California since 2005.
Posts Tagged ‘france’
La Poste
La Poste, the French postal service, is infamous for rude and unreliable service. It’s French no real surprise here, however I wonder how much is influenced by the architecture, product design and collaterals?
Tags: architecture, design, france, product, service
A sad state of affairs
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.
Mobile phone usage amongst French teenagers (2002)
Yesterday I stumbled upon a paper I wrote while studying at UIAH a few years ago. It’s somewhat still relevant.
Abstract
This paper reports an informal study that investigated the use of mobile phones among French Parisian teenagers. The focus is on the ways in which teenagers use their phones as part of their everyday life, and how they handle their personal data. The purpose is to gain from a designer point of view a deeper insight into the mobile phone use, something that will make possible better design of mobile technology for young people.
Raphael_Grignani_-_Mobile_phone_usage_amongst_French_teenagers.pdf
Tags: design, france, mobilephones, teenagers
Familiar objects
When I travel outside of my backyard (Europe/North America), I am excessively sensitive to my surrounding, simply because I feel disorientated. Naturally, I try to spot/hang on familiar objects, colours, textures, tastes, music, etc. As a Frenchman, it is fairly easy thanks to France cultural and commercial exports -brands like Chanel, Vuitton, L’Oreal, Air France; objects designed by Starck, Bouroullec, Tse-Tse; food like wine, bread, chocolate, music like Gainsbourg, French Touch techno/house; etc. Instantly these things reassure me and kinda make me feel at “home”. I am not quite sure why, but it is in my guts.
When I stumbled on these two La Marie chairs this afternoon in a bookstore in Meguro station (Tokyo, Japan), it got me thinking about the other world. What elements in a user interface/product instantly bring similar emotions, familiarity and comfort?