The best

It's a fact that I'm really bad at making choices, it took me half an hour to get to a name, but still, I wouldn't call this person "The Best on Design", because there are so much other people I admire for their work.
Anyway, the man I chose in this post will be Victor Papanek, not for his works in design, but for his vision of the way we should design to solve problems, which I feel totally represented with.

Victor Papanek was born in 1927 in Vienna, Austria. He was a designer and educator who became a strong follower of the socially and ecologically responsible design of products, systems, tools, and community infrastructures. Papanek was deeply interested in humankind as such and pursued a fascination for anthropology topics.

Indeed, Papanek was a big disapprover for style-oriented design, which is today, unfortunately, what most people associate design with. I believe that products that only care for aesthetics, are not useful, and if the product is not useful, the provider of those products (designer) won't be useful to society either.

Design has to be Innovative, Responsible, Technological and then; Aesthetic.

Since Papanek was a more theorical man, It's been hard to find some images on his practical work. So i'll have to attach an image of one of his greatest lectures: Design for the Real World.

The role of Public Universities in Chile

Today, the big challenge for Public Universities is to change their politics on the education process. Starting by teaching students how to think from their own introspection after the stage of investigation, not only promoting them to learn WHAT, but also, and more important, learn WHY. In this way, they must change their perspective of what really means the act of learning. It must start by teaching people how to deal with information and situations that are presented to them. 

More specifically what is needed in public university education is to generate knowledge, train students to be able to contribute to different subjects through research, and become agents of development. This means that the final product in the workflow of a public university is NOT a professional (such as private universities), BUT the contribution to society that this professional does. According to this, it would be appropriate to emphasize the huge difference that makes the foment of research and development in different countries, which in the long term determines its level of progress. 

Regarding economic issues and how to sustain public universities, the criteria that formerly existed where the objectives of public entities was to able access to various social sectors, today seems poorly reflected. Nowadays the government contribution to the public universities is not enough for their maintenance. That's why to continue operating, they must raise student fees to levels where there is not much difference on what is paid at a private university.

 

Ultimately we are faced with an inconsistent system, whereupon the only hope is a change, but a substantial change, with another university, with the definition of a new model rather than the reiteration of what's available today. 

My favourite piece of technology.

Well, it's hard to chose among all of them. I would go for the PC, because of all its aplications and how it simplifies life (especially for designers), but it's sort of cliché, so i will tell you about my new adquisition. The Intova IC700 underwater camera .



Since i'm a big fan of freediving and the underwater world, I've always wanted to keep a record of my experiences in it, so i could show the people the beautifulness of the sea here in Chile, to teach them that the caribbean is not the only place where to dive. Remember we have more than 83.500 km of coast!

That is why I decided to acquire an underwater camera, since they're focused in professionals and experts photographers, they're very expensive. I wanted something that wasn't that sofisticated and found these cameras. So i purchased one on eBay about 3 months ago. Although it's not the best camera, I believe it's the best deal for the money.


So far i've taken pictures in very nice places like Quintero and Horcón, and planning to go to Algarrobo, and Punta de Choros in short time.

The BBC learning english. A nice initiative

This English learning site is brought to us totally free (well, of course there are ads) by the famous BBC. Although it may not be a complete academic compendium on english, it has some very nice features, such as the flash games which i really liked. This is a potential tool that could be used with more efficiency in the future on local schools, because they're not that hard to design and program.
On the other part, refering to the videos. Series like "the teacher" or the "flatmates" are a bit different of what i'm used to see on audiovisual exercises. And they have that touch of humour (or humor, i don't know if we're sticking with British or American spelling) that enhances the overall learning experience, so that's another thumb up for them.

Here are some links to different free resources given by Cambridge University at different levels:

http://www.cambridge.org/touchstonearcade/
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/connect2e/connectarcade/
http://www2.cambridge.org/interchangearcade/interchange_index.jsp

Hope they're useful, peace.