An overview of the French digital ecosystem

A four hour slot was dedicated to the working group’s session. First part featured invited speakers from the French local ecosystem, from 10:00 to 12:30 am.air castle slides

Benoît Drouillat, president of Designers Interactifs, the main professional organisation for interaction design in France, introduced the current state of the art in France : trends within the profession, the level of recognition by institutional partners, design education players and main figures. He outlined the multiplicity of terms and definitions and the effective lack of recognition of interaction design as a proper field of design practice, despite a quite healthy and active mix of well trained professional designers, innovative companies and studios, and valuable design courses. But as we’re in France, everything should be more complicated… Read the content of the presentation on Designers Interactifs website.

Virginia Cruz and Nicolas Gaudron from the design consultancy fim IDSL made a concise but complete overview of the process of innovation they engage with their clients (with a perfect fluent english, thanks Virginia). They drew the line quite efficiently between problem solving for applied innovative solutions to a broader social approach. Unfortunately we are not able to present their works for non disclosure matters, but there is a comprehensive portfolio of their projects on the IDSL website.

Some feedback from the Cumulus members : an “open mic” session

The second part in the afternoon was stuck with four presentations from various Cumulus members, with very little time for discussion unfortunately.inflatable roller ball

Dominique Sciamma, head of Strate Collège Designers, introduced the “Interactive Systems & Objects” programme.

Martin Zimper, head of the CAST programme at Zürich (Switzerland) ZHDK, made a nice introduction to this new department dedicated to new audiovisual formats & experiments for online and mobile media.

Niels Hendriks, a young researcher from KHLim Media and Design Academy in Genk (Belgium), shared with us the questions raised by the “Social Spaces” research group.

Finally, last but not least, Ulrich Schendzielorz from Schwäbisch Gmünd HfG (Germany) made a very efficient presentation of the Interaction Design BFA program in SG.

Next Cumulus Digital Culture is planned during the Cumulus fall conference in Denver, September 29th 2011. Fred Murell from RMCAD will introduce us to the fascinating IxD community in Colorado. Programme will be announced on this blog as soon as possible. Participation is open to Cumulus members, please send me a mail !

Frédéric Degouzon
Head of Strategy, L’École de design Nantes Atlantique
f.degouzon@lecolededesign.com
Follow @fdegouzon