February 7th, 2009
[SERENDIPITY]: The Antwerp Design Seminars & Lectures are an international event taking place each year at the College of Design Sciences. Its aim is to stimulate cross boundary thinking in design and to familiarize students with an interdisciplinary approach to design problems.
The Antwerp Design Seminars and Lectures intend to act as a forum for faculty and student exchange on an international level. At the same time, it is an informal platform to discuss actual problems related to design education.
The word Serendipity derives from Serendip, the old Persian name for Sri Lanka, and was coined by Horace Walpole on 28 January 1754 in a letter he wrote to his friend Horace Mann in which he explained about a storey he read, a kind of fairytale, ‘The three Princes from Serendip’. The storey itself isn’t a good example of what we nowadays understand by the word: it is rather an exemple of induction. In this way it is better to refer to the French scientist Louis Pasteur who famously said: “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”
Since 1954 Serendipity is also the name of a New York restaurant. This isn’t of any importance if it’s not becoming
related to Andy Warhol who frequented it and quoted the word in his autobiography ‘THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol
(From A to B and Back Again)’ reflecting the main goal of what we want to achieve into the ADSL-workshops: searching
for some results but finding other things that are more important than the ones we could have imagined before.
In this context “Serendipity” is linked to the power of any alert spirit to take conclusions out of coincidences. In other
words: every intelligent, well-informed person becomes much more capable of making inventions by pure accident:
the art of finding the pleasantly unexpected by chance or sagacity.
ADSL 2009 will explore the references out of the world of literature, contemporary art, music, design, … and aims
to investigate the power of a variety of images and thoughts in landscape, architecture, engineering, interior design,
monument care, through a poetic and personal intuition in order to reach beyond the specific discipline.
for details: http://www.adsl2009.be