Design Saint-Etienne

Place au changement/Place du géant. Credit : Collectif ETC, 2011

The eighth edition of the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne places prospective at the centre of its programming, exploring the major issues of society, and revealing through design the innovations which will influence our life tomorrow.

Les frères Plo n°1, meuble de rangement, Gaspard GRAULICH, 2012

All the regional actors have worked together to develop the regional dimension of the event. The Biennial will therefore be present in 60 different sites, with 49 exhibitions and 27 rendezvous spread throughout the Saint-Etienne agglomeration and the metropolitan region.

Collection Axor Bouroullec, 2010, Ronan et Erwan Bouroullec

Exhibition 

Traits d’union objets d’empathie 

Curator and Scenography: eliumstudio 

Cité du design - la Platine 

March 14th - September 1st, 2013

Industrial design is often looked at from a perspective of use, of function, or of a form of production. Today, a whole section of industrial production places the user as an actor of innovation and its applications. Now virtually multi-disciplinary, design accompanies change, and is expressed in a multiplicity of interventions. New issues of society, technological and digital progress, and environmental preoccupations, all create new scenarios, and a design in empathy with its time, must take these notions into account to produce a synthesis through the object. The Traits d'Union exhibition profits therefore from the theme of the 8th Biennial to propose an approach to the industrially produced object, and its relation with the final beneficiary, through the prism of empathy. Traits d'union induces a new interpretation of innovation design, balanced between goods and services, technology and humanity, industry and society, and leaves open a field of multiple questioning, including the central question of who shapes the other?

BUENOS AIRES
PETBOL for Marca Carcel X Satorilab, Alejandro Sarmiento, Lujan Cambariere, 2012

Exhibition 

EmpathiCITY, Making our City together 

Curators: Lætitia Wolff & Josyane Franc
Scenography: Adrien Rovero 

Cité du design - Bâtiments H 

 

Designers sometimes fulfill the role of mediators between citizens, communities and governments. What should be done for their ideas to lead to transformations on a human level, rather than just for buildings? How can we give communities a sense of responsibility through collaborative processes, and combine design, social engineering and technology to make a city better connected?

 

EmpathiCITY consists of a project based on the activation of the UNESCO network of the eleven Creative Cities of Design. The exhibition begins with an urban problem which is specific to each city and focuses on transversal questions (public spaces, health, sustainable development), in order to help change uses and behavior. The members of the Creative Cities of Design network participate by sharing best uses with other cities during a symposium. The cities can present either a collaboration between designers and the urban community on a recent project; or elaborate a project inspired by the "expoTENtial" trans-disciplinary platform developed in New York by Lætitia Wolff.

SEOUL
First Village below the Sky, Hyunjin PARK, Dong-soo PARK, Seoul Design Foundation, 2009

 

Exhibition 

Volume 

Site Manufacture — Bâtiments H

 

 

Volume is the transcription of a new vision of outdoor dwelling, far removed from the present offer of mobile homes and chalets... The principal idea was, to make a multi-purpose, transportable, fun space, from a bulky useless disused container, able to host 4 people in a surface area of 30m². A space without constraints, able to be adapted to the wiles of the occupants. Volume proclaims itself to be "a loft in the middle of Central Park".

Volume

Experiment 

Place au changement
2e opus 

Quartier Châteaucreux 

 

The Collective Etc, commissioned by the Public Town-Planning Institution of Saint-Etienne (EPASE), offers to create a second phase of the project "Place au changement/ Place du Géant" (time to change, giant's square). This participative work of public space construction, in the heart of the Chateaucreux quarter, had been initiated following a public tender for the project in 2011. The Collective Etc wishes to create places of discussion and to concretise an improvement in the building environment and utilisation in and around the "Place du Géant". The collective will accompany the worksite with activities making this temporary space an urban laboratory.