École Bleue: eight months of research, and nobody is selling anything

A school exhibition is the only place at a fair where you see what will be produced in five years, rather than what sells this year. It is also the only place where nobody is trying to sell you anything.

What Design Global is

The École Bleue was founded in 1995 and is accredited by the Ministry of Culture. It trains students in interior architecture, product design, graphic design and cultural scenography. Design Global is the final-year exercise for its fifth-year students.

A degree here represents eight months of research, experimentation and material exploration. Eight months on a single project is more time than most manufacturers devote to a catalogue piece — and that is why these exhibitions are worth the detour.

What you are really looking at

Not products: hypotheses. A school project has no price, no cost of production, no stock or transport constraint. That freedom is its weakness — many of these objects will never be manufacturable as they stand — and it is also its purpose: to test materials and uses that nobody can afford to test in production.

This is the path by which recycled materials, glue-free assemblies and pieces designed to be dismantled reached our interiors, ten or twenty years late. Each began as a student project that nobody took seriously.

Why it interests us

Because our tool can tell you what an existing piece is, and nothing more. Faced with a degree project, it falls silent — the object has no manufacturer, no reference, no price. That is the limit of the system, and it is a limit worth looking in the eye once a year: everything we know how to identify began as something nobody could identify.

Going there

École Bleue — the Design Global degree exhibition during Paris Design Week. The venue and opening hours are not published: check with the school before setting out.

The Beyit gesture: photograph a piece and scan it — the tool tells you who makes it, at what price, and what exists around it.