Exhibition opening

EnvironmentPersonal

There is an exhibition opening at the Cite des Sciences et de l’Industrie at La Villette in Paris on October the 17th. There is no website to point you to yet, and I do not even know the title of the exhibition …… it is about sustainable lifestyles (how to live a happy life without consuming the planet).

The exhibition was the brainchild of my good friend Thierry Kazazian, co-founder of O2 and founder of O2 France, that country’s leading sustainable design consultancy; and author of “Il y aura l’age des choses legeres” (An era of lighter things), a manual for sustainable design and development.

I was a product and furniture designer before I became a software developer. Thierry and I worked together on many interesting projects, exhibitions, seminars, thought-experiments.

Sadly, Thierry died last February after a long and courageous struggle with leukaemia. He is very deeply missed by many, not least his wife and two young children. I miss the laughter, we always had fun together, we could always talk about the most serious things in a crazy way, we were catalysts for each other’s creativity. I am still devastated by the loss.

Two years ago, he invited me to take part in the process of developing the concepts behind the exhibition, which would then be passed on to a group of design students to do the actual work. Six of us spent two delightful weekends brainstorming the concepts. Some of us had worked together on similar exhibitions and were already good friends. I am an ideas kind of guy ….. there are few things I find more satisfying that brainstorming in the ego-free environment of people who are good at it.

We came up with some really fun and radical ideas, most of which I suspect will not see the light of day in a high prestige government sponsored exhibition.

In the run-up to the exhibition opening, I hope to publish here some of the notes from the concept stage and subsequent writings, ideas that for me just will not go away …..

….. so if my last blog post seemed a bit out of the blue, subject wise ….. now you know


Update

The exhibition is called “Changer d’ere” (Change of Era ??) It runs from the 17th of October at Cite des Sciences et de l’Industrie at Porte de la Villette in Paris.


Update

There is a brief entry on the website of Cite des Sciences et de l’Industrie, about the exhibition, here. There are no translations yet ……