Transcriber: Krystian Aparta Reviewer: TED Translators admin
Hello, everyone.
Indeed, the Oscar ceremony is much easier,
because you are expected to say,
"Oh, thank you very much," then cry.
And I am expected to speak for more than 15 minutes
in English.
(Laughter)
So you see it will be a story about a woman
who has her head in the clouds,
but she is trying to keep her feet on the ground.
It will also be a story about a town.
Historical, beautiful, small, called Cieszyn.
And a castle.
Cieszyn was the capital of the Duchy of Teschen for ages.
And, as often happened in history,
the towns and the castles have better times, of prosperity,
but also have times of poverty.
This old orangery
was build by Habsburgs in the 19th century,
and destroyed in the '60s.
The ruins of the castle
and the empty space of the orangery
were a really good starting point
for the idea to create a completely new castle,
now one of the most innovative places in Poland.
That's the castle.
Oh, wait, that's the empty place.
You see, it was a lovely parking place for the citizens of Cieszyn.
And now, the castle.
But believe me...
It is not so difficult to rebuild even the castle.
It's much more difficult to breathe life into the building.
So let me tell the story of how it happened
that in a small, provincial town,
Cieszyn has about 35 thousand people,
the first regional design center was created.
And it was in fact thanks to ambitions and beliefs.
It was in 1999
when 16 new provinces were created in Poland.
It was the second step of local government reform.
And among these 16 provinces,
the Silesian region was created,
and belongs in fact to the biggest regions,
with its population of more than 5 million people.
The government of the new province
from the very beginning has been fighting against stereotypes
which show the region as the most polluted,
highly industrialized, and not an attractive place.
And surprisingly, they chose design as a tool for change.
And believe me,
it is one of the most effective tools, also in regional development.
Probably, when I say "design,"
you think and you see these fancy, luxurious, expensive
and sometimes completely useless products
which are shown in lifestyle magazines.
It's not that design we are looking for.
And it's not that design we promote at the castle.
So let me tell you what "design" means.
Almost everybody understands that design is really good business.
What I would like to show is a product,
simple traffic lights,
produced in a local company
and designed by a young Silesian designer.
The new product is much easier to construct,
less expensive,
very easy to remove and to repair.
And maybe it is worth mentioning that these traffic lights
are exported to 23 countries all over the world.
There are hundreds of different definitions of design.
The latest one, given by a 4-year-old, Marta,
is that design "makes things simple."
My private definition of design is that design is a quality.
This is really important to underline in a country like Poland.
Quality driven by expertise, science,
and cooperation between specialists from different fields.
What you see on the screen is the iconic carpet "DIA,"
designed and produced in Silesia by the Moho company.
You see a very traditional pattern,
and you also see a very traditional material.
It is wool felt.
But the whole carpet is cut by water laser.
Design --
has a huge impact on public space,
which in Poland, in fact, belongs to nobody.
What you see is just a communication system,
designed, again, by Silesian designers
for the airport in Katowice-Pyrzowice.
Very logical, useful, clear.
And attractive with violet and green colors.
The nearest issue, challenge for design
is designing public services.
And this probably happened to everyone of you.
Not being able, with this Intercity ticket,
to distinguish between the train number,
the carriage number and the seat number.
It would have been so easy to use a proper, or different, typeface.
A different size of the letters, or even pictograms,
to make this ticket intelligible to Polish travelers,
but also for foreigners.
I think that we already know something about added value for businesses.
But we know almost nothing about what great power design has
for social economy.
This small object...
It is a piggy bank.
Simple, funny.
Designed for a couple,
to invite you to compete in saving money.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
That is part of a bigger project.
Thanks to the Adam Mickiewicz Institute,
a group of young Polish designers from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts
and the Holon Institute of Technology, from Israel,
were working together and designed,
and made prototypes for a social foundation in Cieszyn.
The chosen products, and this piggy bank,
are now manufactured by homeless and jobless people in Cieszyn.
That's a nice story.
And this is the way to come back to Cieszyn.
And to the fundamental question:
why do we promote design in such a small, provincial town.
And the answer is easy.
Why not!
(Laughter)
When I met Peter Wirtz in 2004,
so just before we opened the Center,
full of doubts and full of fear
about how to design a design center
far away from the centers,
from the biggest media, businesses, art academies, international fairs.
He told me...
"Who knows where Coca-Cola is made?
Be the best.
People will find you."
It is not very easy, as you can suppose.
We've been looking all the time for different funds.
These graphic signs you see,
these are logos of our European projects we've been realizing
with local government, companies,
associations, public administration.
From handicrafts to the newest technologies.
But as you are very aware, funding is important.
But it's not the most important,
because people are much more important,
with their enthusiasm, work, beliefs and dreams.
And we are people, and we have dreams,
and we still have some ideas worth realizing.
So because of the rapid development of the castle,
we got the new --
Oh, wait a moment.
That's it, you see.
The new building.
Quite ugly.
It's an old border post from the 60's.
Located exactly on the border line between Poland and Czech Republic.
The first sight we greet you with in Poland.
And we do have plans to change it.
With the great help of the famous Polish,
again, Silesian, architect, Robert Konieczny,
to have a much more comfortable place,
to organize, for example, international events on the border.
We hope we will do it.
And we hope that we will get this chance again.
Because I do believe
that "if you can dream it, you really can do it."
Thank you.
(Applause)