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Interview - with Alexander Manu Chair of Industrial Design, Ontario College of Art and Design
He is a practicing designer, lecturer and fonder of the Axis Group International Toronto. He will be one of the invited jurors at the14th BraunPrize. During a visit to Braun and his presentation at the Designes Saturday in Stuttgart in October 2002, he spoke with the BraunPrize team and answered questions regarding the BraunPrize.
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When and how did you decide to become a designer and why?
My journey to design was a rather curious one, as my first intentions were to become a painter. I grew up reading voraciously about the life of artists, enough so that my early heroes were Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Bosh, Siqueiros, Rivera and my favorite book was Giorgio Vasari's "The lives of artists, sculptors and architects". By fourteen I was producing one canvas a week and my only concern was where to find enough money to buy oil paints. As I enrolled in a Fine Arts High School in Bucharest, I became exposed to other forms of expression through art - sculpture and ceramics. It was in the ceramics lab that I discovered the power of useful objects, the power of making something "for others" to use. Contrasting ceramics with my experiences in painting was an eye opener and I was 17 when I knew that I wanted to make objects with purpose and on purpose for others, I wanted to participate in others lives as only designers can.
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What was the most interesting project you designed?
I am now involved in a project that concerns the creation of a new product category for the home and while most projects are interesting the ones that interest me the most are projects that search new territories. The one project that shaped my professional interests was a portable personal computer I designed in 1982. I know, "personal computer" sounds boring, but in 1982 when I started the project this would have been one of the first in the world, there were no references for it, no archetype has been established as to what a portable personal computer should look and feel like. This was more than a project, as I had to learn about this new experience that was about to be created, the experience of personal computing, and had to imagine use scenarios for a new type of human artifact. These are in my view the purest of design's tasks, the creation of new product typologies.
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