Agamben exhorts us to turn the apparatus against itself, to take it over, to ‘desecrate’ it, to free ourselves from its bondage. We must become players rather than mere vectors. We see a utopia shaping up here, so necessary in the disenchanted world of the ‘end of History’. There will be neither winner nor loser there, but rather a perpetual unbalance, capable of impelling the motor of History in us. Faced as we are with apparatus and things, rather than reject them we should exploit them, turn them into series, sidetrack and subvert them. But that will not be enough: merchandise itself already uses these same procedures. What we must do above all is propose new things that are reasoned and related to other senses and values than those that they relay without our knowing it. We must conceive of these things in terms of political economy, by bringing together usage and meaning, utility and lastingness, pleasure and reason, the individual and the social fabric, power and knowledge. In short, we must invent them to invite exchanges. Only then, perhaps, and provided they become mediators in these ways, will objects exist once more to serve us.


 
Jean-Louis Fréchin is a DPLG architect and a graduate of the ENSCI, where he trained under Yves Savinel, Gilles Rozé and Marc Berthier. In 1989 he left France to work at the INESC, a computer research institute in Lisbon. There he discovered the fertility of drawing together design and computer science. On his return to Paris, he set up a global design partnership with Stéphane Bureaux, handling many industrial and cultural projects. In 1995, he joined the publishers Montparnasse Multimedia to take part in the adventure of producing quality multimedia titles. His work is always based on the idea of global design and aims at making an intrinsic link between content, interactive design and technology - at creating meaning. Many of his creations have won prizes: notably series like « Les petits débrouillards », « La Terre merveilleuse », « L’histoire de l’aviation », « Le Louvre, Collections et palais », « La Résistance », etc.

In 2001 he set up NoDesign, a digital design office specializing in creation, innovation and strategic thinking for information technologies, interactions and user protocols in industrial and cultural projects. A recognized front-runner in digital design, he is also a consultant for firms in new fields: innovation by design, advanced technologies, innovation strategy. Founder and head of the Digital design studio at the ENSCI / les Ateliers in Paris in 1998, it is there that he passes on his experience, culture, insatiable curiosity and ‘project’ method. For him, design is a state, a prism for understanding and questioning the world. New challenges, new territories, attempting to enlarge the ‘scope of what is possible’ and ‘desirable’, without losing the basic values of design; meaning, simplicity, emotion, and above all human endeavour.

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