The Trough

The train trip down was filled rolling hills and terracotta roofs, skeletal sheds and autumnal shades.

Designer lighting amongst redundant uniforms

Of course as a design festival there was the odd chair a minimalist concrete buildings that shyly attended, but seeing displays that described how existing objects can be used in new systems appears to provide designers with a very worthy role. Capturing information, communicating ideas and keeping it going. Hope at last! After all these years of nasty slick, consuming design, and me thinking design had become redundant, I find it actually has an important role to play.

Saint Etienne its self has a history as an incredibly industrious place, ribbon making, coal mining, and arms manufacture. The slumps during the 70’s took their toll leaving only museums to show off the residence craftsmanship. Entering the old mining museum was incredibly haunting, frozen the day it shut down, leaving blackened uniforms hanging from the ceiling and headlamps ready to be charged up. Graduates rather poetically showed their virginal white ceramic pieces amongst the iron machinery. The arms factory, where Cite du Design is based, will be converted into a Design centre and school with great hope that the city will be transformed again.

More than a fish farm

CityEcoLab, another borough of the festival, was packed with locally sourced materials transformed into exciting architectural forests. The enormous ’shed’ hosted a series of talks on emerging social structures and voluntary groups that are now being recognized as prototypes for the future. Ordinarily I have an aversion to sustainable design being segregated from the rest of the design world, on this occasion it shone with great examples of design in action like ‘VeloWala’ and ‘Luck Mi Fortune Cooking’.

Power lines above the allotments

On a short trip to the outskirts of the town, well established mounds of mining tails rose above allotments. Underneath a buzzing set of power lines, Matthieu Benoit-Gonin, gardener and exhibitor at the show, showed me where he had been growing his exhibits. Beautiful smokey black fennel, and cola smelling absinthe, pungent celery and robust cabbages. Saint Etienne boasts 80km of community allotments, even in the cold months of November they were over flowing with the end of the seasons raspberries and crisp lettuces.

My inspired enthusiasm for these people lead initiatives has adorned my return train trip with views of food gardens made in wasteland along the train tracks, dotted amongst the industrial sheds and the car parks.

A gentleman at the garden centre once told me that the record seed sales we saw this year were a sure sign that we were due for a recession, it appears to me that this festival only reflected the ingenious innovations groups are practicing all over the world, and anticipates a people led change of the way we live.

This entry was posted by admin on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 11:33 am. It is filed under Design and has these tags: City Eco Lab, Design, Festival, Saint Etienne. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.