Le design arrive chez Unilog

Pendant de nombreuses années, j’ai donné un cours de pratique professionnelle à des étudiants en année terminale d’un programme universitaire de 4 ans en design industriel. Pour animer les cas d’espèces et les exercices que je présentais aux étudiants, j’ai créé un jeune designer nommé Samuel Thomas Thicke. Samy, en début de carrière, se trouvait souvent confronté aux problèmes auxquels ces finissants allaient faire face dans peu de temps. Après leur avoir décrit les scénarios variés que j’inventais, le défi des étudiants était de sortir Sammy du pétrin. Voici le plus célèbre de ces scénarios à partir duquel les étudiants devaient ensuite rédiger une offre de services.Continue reading →

Walking the Dog

Yibbedy Yabbedy Mongledeeboo
If you’re all like me, this’ll ring true

You get up in the morning, shit shower and shave
then rush to the office where you work like a slave
Kowtow to the boss like he’s some kind of god
Not for the money or the fear of the rod
It’s more like an aura that glows in his wake
Makes you want him be happy, when he’s not, you quake
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For openers

I love opening lines. There are famous ones, of course, but did they become famous because of their inherent worth or because of the novel that followed? That question got me thinking that maybe an opening line (a sentence or two or three), if it’s good enough, can stand on its own without anything else to follow. If it’s strong enough, maybe it can even generate, through its own merit, the words to come. I’ve worked on some suggestions here. Try to imagine taking up a new book and opening the first pages. You feel that low key excitement and apprehension of beginning a new adventure. You start to read …Continue reading →

Knee jerk photography

I sometimes think that photography’s current tremendous popularity is a collective reaction to the fear of living in a world on the brink of destruction. It’s our desperate attempt at recording as much of it as we can before it all disappears. What’s not clear to me, however, is how this human comportement is going to lessen the loss.Continue reading →

Ego booth

Voting is the ultimate test of ego. After all, who would cast their vote after coldly considering its mathematical scale. In this present municipal exercise, there are 1139000 eligible voters in the Montréal elections. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that your solitary vote will have a negligible effect on the end result. In that context, those who decide to stay home on election day are pursing a far more logical strategy than those who participate. So why do we vote?  Continue reading →

Loto inversée

Qu’ils sont idiots, ceux qui achètent des billets de loto ! Leur arrive-t-il d’imaginer ce que c’est de maintenir un espoir face aux probabilités de 1 dans 14 millions de gagner (dans le cas de la loto 6/49) ? John Littlewood, un mathématicien anglais, qualifiait de « miracle » un évènement ayant une probabilité d’arriver de 1 dans 1 million. Acheter un billet de 6/49, c’est donc croire que le sort nous servira 14 miracles simultanément.

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