Award-winning Designer Lectures at AUB

Michel De Boer

The Department of Architecture and Design welcomed the prominent designer Michel De Boer as their first guest speaker in their new lecture series on October 26. As the partner and creative designer of the eminent Studio Dumbar in Amsterdam, De Boer and his team are the recipients of two Designer and Art Directors Golden Awards and seven Silver Awards.

Students of the department met De Boer at the airport in Beirut upon his arrival to greet him. He was very pleased and also astonished with how familiar the students were with Studio Dumbar's designs. With not a single empty seat, the students lined the walls or sat on the floor, entranced at the visual aesthetics of the work of the Studio Dumbar team.

De Boer presented an overview of the studio's projects, from original designs to their most recent adaptations, and the lecture was clearly customized for the target audience of students. Each slide was accompanied with an examination of the project's inspirations and its final virtues, which had ultimately culminated in the design's success.

De Boer's talk effectively engaged the audience, as he explained the dynamic changes occurring in the world of design. He said that a designer's major concern today is working around all the "graphic pollution" to create an eye-catching design. Design has become a mode of implicit advertising and a form of"visual branding." Motivated to give the students as much as possible in the short time he had, De Boer ended his lecture with a pithy note: "Follow your heart. Find your strength. This is the formula Into the Great Wide Open."