Dear Friends,



Like Wolfgang Jonas, I’m almost bursting because I’m not an English-speaking 
native. Maybe I’m not even a native.

There have been quite a few posts I wanted to address to so please indulge 
this blended like piece of writing.

A practical one on Design Examinations: Because of Bologna re structuring, 
we had to offer to the students the possibility of doing an examination in 
September (A sort of appeal exam). We used to do this just for theoretical 
or scientific courses like Art History or Science of the Materials. Well, we 
decided to do a 15 days exam for the projectual courses. We called it a 
Design Challenge. The student works inside a room for two weeks without 
taking the work home. The Challenge is sized for the two-week period. 
Period.

About Wonderground, the plenary, the sessions, the genders, we had the 
program in the website (changing all the time) for two weeks before the 
event, and the abstracts also. Lots of people asked for changes based mostly 
on arrival and departure times. Only Hernan Casakin (Hi, Hernan) spotted 
that his paper was ill placed regarding the contents and asked to be moved 
to another session.

Guys, let’s be true and fair: I have placed all 244 papers in the sessions 
by myself. If we had did it in a collaborative work we would be still 
discussing who matches who. Some people registered a week before the 
conference and presented the paper in a somewhat correlated session, so it 
was very similar to the third ring of Hell…

I believe that Clive’s comment has to do with the format of conferences.

I also once did like Richard addressing the crowd of nearly 11 people in a 
parallel session in EAD Bremen. After a somewhat interesting puzzling 
interior/exterior creative architecture paper from New Zealand, I asked the 
audience who had read my paper. Rosan Chow shouted “Three times” and two 
arms went up. Not wisely for a non-native I decided not to read the paper 
but to speak about it and then be open to discussion. After a short 
presentation about why I considered Edward Lear, Lewis Carrol and Gary 
Larson the true design theorists (and why Gary Larson’s FarSide is only 
comparable to à La Recherche du Temps Perdue) someone in the audience asked 
me if I thought that non-sense was only a male thing…

To that person, please accept my very late response: Louise Bourgeois and 
Paula Rego.

Cheers everyone,



Eduardo



PS: did you know that Galileu presented a paper to the Academia Fiorentina 
di Lettere about the Shape, Location and Size of Dante’s Inferno. That’s my 
kind of Science guy: never to be afraid of those guys from Literature, there 
are always some calculations that they can’t do.