Semester start and a wiggling behind

What is the meaning of life? And what about design?

It was the really big questions that Rector Elsebeth Gerner Nielsen had prepared as she welcomed new and old students to the first day of the academic year 2015. Hundreds of students – old and 82 new – had hardly found their seat before Rector suggested an answer to the existential question.

- Every year, Design School Kolding sends some very talented designers out into the world. Designers who may never have gotten anything but top marks. Still some of them do not get anywhere. Because they cannot decide where to go. Because they do not want to say yes to something and then risk missing out on something else. Because in fact, they do not know what it takes for a life to become meaningful.

- So the point is that top marks will not get you anywhere if you have not found the answer to the existential question: Why am I here?

A total of 82 new students will begin studying design this year and Elsebeth Gerner Nielsen urged that they take time to contemplate on the concept of design.

- Let me talk a little bit about the definition of design, she started.

- Design is also about meaning. Because the purpose of design is to create meaningful solutions, and by that I mean solutions that people can easily relate to.

- Recently I read a story from an African country where an engineering company had set up a water pump in a village. A solution that meant that women and children no longer had to walk miles and miles to collect water. A practical and technically sound solution.

- Still, the women did not use the pump. And the reason is that in order to activate the pump, they had to swing a lever from side to side causing them to swing also their behind, which is strictly prohibited for women of that culture. The pump worked on a technical level but not on a cultural and an emotional level. A designer would never have created a solution like that (I hope).