Brand design / Signage / Communications
Duration of the project: 12 months – Delivery: November 2009

Design is one of the obvious symbols of the 20th century, both stakeholder and critic of the industrial model and the consumer society where it evolves.

In that sense, it is the heart and the model. Housing, industrial spaces, wooded parks, city center, street furniture, manufactured products: everything around us belongs to a type or another world of design which is presently hardly inevitable.

The designer is neither an artist, nor an engineer, not even a craftsman. He is a combination of the three, even if in a functional way he does not specialize in any of these.

He is an artist as his job is first to imagine and implement the idea. He is a technician, because at a given moment this creation must be confronted to some industrial reality, production logics or usage principle.

He is finally a craftsman as he integrates the work on materials and shaping to his practice. This transverse role makes the designer unavoidable and based on this axiom, the Ile-de-France region has created le Lieu du Design in order to forge and organize the links between the stakeholders of design in the region: designers, design schools, structures which promote design in France and worldwide, industry leaders calling upon designers to shape new products, new services, new usages and anyone, from craftsmen to manufacturers of materials, colors and prototypes who give life to concepts.

This is a collaborative, transverse and participative task which gathers energies and reflects on the usage of the projects and on the knowledge of those who design and produce them.