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The SIP System: A Design Research Concept at the Paris Centre Beaubourg, 19731992

The Institutional Beginnings of the SIP System In 1978, during six intensive months as an intern, I was the only direct participant to have the privilege of observing, for a long period, the implementation of a short-lived Paris initiative in design research, the Système d’Information sur les Produits (SIP System). The following is a brief account of my observations, 30 years later. The account is my contribution to the ongoing debate on Design practice that some consider as an Art, others as a Technique, and others as a Science. The SIP System was initiated in 1973. That year, Michel Millot, a Paris-based practicing industrial designer and a graduate of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany, was hired to chair a 12-member consulting team, the Groupe DIAS (Design Industriel, Analyse et Sélection). This group was formed under an agreement signed between two institutions: the Conseil Supérieur de la Création Esthétique Industrielle, a division of the then-French Ministère du Développement Industriel et Scientifique, and the Centre de Création Industrielle (CCI). The CCI had been a division of the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratif, a showroom created in 1882 to promote the best (i.e., “beautiful and useful”) of the booming nineteenth to twentiethcentury industrial production in France. In July 1973, under the same agreement, the CCI became one of the four departments within the innovative Établissement Public du Centre Beaubourg. The Centre Georges Pompidou, or Centre Beaubourg as it has come to be publicly known, was created in 1969, on the personal initiative of the late French President, Georges Pompidou. President Pompidou decided to make all facets of culture more accessible to the general public. The new CCI mandate was then established: to provide the public with pertinent information on “modern” material culture, within the fields of industrial design, architecture and landscaping, and visual communication and to showcase the avant-garde of French industrial production. There couldn’t be a more appropriate building than the one hosting the Centre Beaubourg. Beaubourg was the quintessence of industrial (post-)modernist production, albeit not necessarily corresponding to the traditional canon of “beauty” and “good taste.”