Ephemeral University theme: Design & Transition(s) :
protest as a driver of innovation. From October 21 to 23, 2019, more than 80 students from Design, Sciences, Urban Planning and Innovation Management wondered what they are contesting today thanks to a “critical design” approach . Supervised by the designers and associated researchers, the students had three days to formalise their disputes with a scripted "manifesto" which gave rise to a theatrical interpretation.

What does the Ephemeral University of Design look like?
The ephemeral university of design took place over three days, articulated around several workshops (production, debates) augmented by resources, conferences which came to feed the students with Geoffrey Dorne, designer, two guest professors from the 'University of Monterrey, an Open forum where each of the facilitators talk about an experience or achievement that can be part of a proposal for a response to an initial challenge, the involvement of bodies with improvisational actors for play the scenarios they imagined.

"I expect these three days from the students that they can appropriate the action of protest, from a very personal point of view - what annoys them, irritates them and how to challenge , in what form, violent, non-violent, systematic, digital, in the street, at the level of the city, of the family. There are a thousand and one ways to contest and I expect to be surprised, to be saddened by their form of protest to get me out of my habits, my daily life. That it can wake me up "Geoffrey Dorne

Thus, the students, who left as a group, challenged the criteria for access to the territory, individualism, the hyper connection of individuals, the fact that the planet was not taken into account in our choices or even prejudices ...

"The advantage of the format is that it creates space-time so that at a given moment students, who are invested with new societal questions, grasp it in an interdisciplinary way and take the time to reflect on an objective which is not a solutionist but rather an objective of putting in perspective critical of the problems which they meet today and which they will meet throughout their professional and personal life. " Sylvia Frédériksson, designer, researcher

An original educational module
The ephemeral university implements a complex approach to questions through design that gives the experience of a critical co-construction by using some of the group creativity methods developed and tested by Promising. It is an unprecedented opportunity to make students from university and various schools work on a common project, to confront them with the other disciplines that they will come into contact with in the world of work in order to “more easily” tackle the complexity of the problems that 'they will meet.

"For me it is important to live things rather than to learn them by theory. It is the dream to experience things in group, to think for myself of the possible possibilities of answers to the problems which are posed to me The university should offer us a lot more projects like this "Frida, M1 Management of Innovation, Grenoble IAE

"I think that the initiative to combine different disciplines makes the experience wonderful. We learn things, to look higher, to do theater, to design, it's huge, we should do this more often "Nedja, student at ENSAG, DPEA Design.