PATRICK NORGUET
"ECLECTISM"
For Patrick Norguet, product design is a business - an intrusive, fascinating business that is managed with financial constraints, rents and salaries to pay, delivery deadlines to meet, and clients to find and retain. If he had to define his work, it would be more specification design than discourse design. Let us put aside the vision of the shaman-designer who, by assiduously frequenting creative minds, is said to deposit the fruits of his visions in galleries and museums, the sacred temples of design.Unknown just five years ago, Norguet has been racking up name-checks, awards and other distinctions in 2005. This swift success is no artificial media bubble. Patrick Norguet has not won the design version of a TV pop talent show. Norguet has a vocational qualification in industrial draughtsmanship, lathing and milling, and is a production-technology engineer. His trade is anchored - structured, even - by his knowledge of materials, production tools and manufacturing processes. Before dreaming about objects, he first learnt to redraw the limits of possibility using technical means. Aged around 30, he left Tours and ventured into the study of object design at the École Supérieure du Design Industriel, a now-defunct school that could not withstand the resounding siren calls of commercialised education. There he supplemented his training and discovered that the limits of possibility can also be extended by design. Paris provided its cultural resources; sponge-like, he absorbed them avidly. Though dazzled by the fireworks of the design milieu, he quickly learnt to tell apart the fleeting sparks generated by the abrasive media spotlight and the discipline's beacons and lasting lights. Encountering numerous companies, building a team of collaborators, and discovering know-how and combinations of materials and technologies in one industry, then another. It has been a struggle against the hectic swirl of time, to give value to the present moment - the moment a design is drafted, the moment an execution is contemplated, the moment of pleasure when one sits in an armchair designed equally well for the backside and the back as for the eye. The shared moment. The right moment. Being a freelance designer also means calming time.www.patricknorguet.com
