Premsela Lectures

Green is a hot buzzword - but the visionary sustainable entrepreneur Gunter Pauli argues that many environmentally friendly production processes still aren't good enough. In his book Blue Economy, Pauli describes a new business model that's based on the use of local resources and consigns leftover materials and waste to the past. In the eighth Premsela Lecture on Sunday 4 November 2012 in Amsterdam, he talked about how designers could contribute to this new way of doing business.

The eminent US sociologist Richard Sennett talked about what designers could learn from musicians in the 2011 Premsela Lecture, "Out of Touch", on 26 June at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ in Amsterdam. In his lecture, Sennett argues for feeling and emotion. He observes that in our "user-friendly", increasingly digitised world we no longer feel products – we are literally out of touch. And he explains the surprising lessons we can learn from wild cellists.

The eminent US cognitive scientist Nancy Etcoff talked about a unique human activity, to dress, in the 2010 Premsela Lecture, "Born to Adorn", on 26 May at the Royal Institute for the Tropics in Amsterdam. Etcoff asks why we have been doing this since the beginning of human memory. Grooming and adornment increase an individual's attractiveness but also constitute clear sexual signals. Clothing turns the human body into a "supernormal stimulus", sending an exaggerated, provocative signal that out-does the natural original. Adornment and clothing contribute to a fruitful life, you might say. And we can speak of an evolutionary process from people having sex to ideas having sex.

The philosopher Henk Oosterling gave the fifth Premsela Lecture at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. In Dasein as Design, he discussed design's changing role in everyday life. Must design save the world? Oosterling described a new tendency and ethic he called 'relational design', which is concerned with relationships more than with individuality. He suggested this would be the way to move beyond the problems of excessive consumerism and individualism.