![](\"http:\/\/designswarm.webfactional.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/festival.jpg\"\/)
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I wandered into downtown yesterday, in the bitter cold (it was around 13 degrees celcius, I haven’t felt that since my dutch winter many months ago) and bumped into what appeared to be the beginning of a week-long celebration of “fashion and design”. Another use of the word design. Interesting, i thought.<\/p>\n
As I walked along McGill College avenue (which had been closed off for the event), they were still setting things up. A huge fashion stage took most of the space. A few over-tanned youngsters were giving out free Gillette razors, American express had a corporate booth, makeup stations were giving free makeup advice, massages, etc.<\/p>\n
Scattered around the site Sid Lee<\/a> a wellknown marketing agency in town, and communications partner of designmontreal, had attempted to get the point across that Montreal had been awarded the UNESCO city of design status for 2007.<\/p>\n Tall monolith-like boxes acted as billboards to explain this. The first one attempted to deconstruct the design of famous architectural landscapes in Montreal. Describing a step by step design process of the Olympic stadium (a structure better known for it’s failures, notably it’s dysfunctional roof) and Habitat 67 to name just 2.<\/p>\n The next one caught my eye as I had seen the design online<\/a>. Bright large stickers covered the entire surface of the billboard with “le design c’est…” (design is…) and left the rest to the public. So far the public’s reaction was “design is the new esperanto”, “design is ugly”, “design is nothing”, etc.. In the middle of the monolith though there was an unfolded pizza box, with “the pizza will arrive cold” drawn on it and a written short story of a pizza delivery boy and his fight through traffic among a beautiful city he has learnt to ignore.<\/p>\n This was somewhat of a strange mixture. It wanted to be an attempt at user-generated \/public opinion content but with the guerilla-style advertising pizza box taped in the middle it was hard to tell what we were supposed to look at or if we should even participate. As I wrote about last week, in light of the AIGA<\/a> talk, it’s always good to set some rules if you want people to get involved. Otherwise, well, that’s what you get. Crapucopia.<\/p>\n Esperanto indeed, a language which everyone should talk and understand, but noone really does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I wandered into downtown yesterday, in the bitter cold (it was around 13 degrees celcius, I haven’t felt that since my dutch winter many months ago) and bumped into what appeared to be the beginning of a week-long celebration of “fashion and design”. Another use of the word design. Interesting, i thought. As I walked… Continue reading Mixed messages (Day 3 of looking)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-7g","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/designswarm.webfactional.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/stadium.jpg\"\/)
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