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CLMN | Can parallel lines meet?

26/11/2014

Eindhoven, 8:35 am, two bike flows: Witte Dame-Piazza-Station-TU/e and, from right to left, TU/e-Station-Piazza-Witte dame. You better decide carefully which route to follow, and the type of Eindhovener you’ll be: the designer or the engineer. The question is: will these two parallel lines ever meet?

I have a daily morning dream, while lazily biking to my office along the ‘engineer route’. I imagine a certain Ms Designer crossing the street, chatting with Mr Engineer at the traffic light and, why not, falling in love with him. How would a love story like that go? Before drawing any pessimistic conclusions, let’s have a look at our protagonists.

Ms Designer: short blonde hair, straightened fringe, black bowler hat, glasses stolen from Steve Urkel, jersey maxiskirt, sneakers, and a canvas bag with some arresting and unconventional meta-quotes as ‘quote painted on canvas’ or ‘c’eci n’est pas une citation’. Our designer doesn’t know Albert Heijn is, as she doesn't need to. She eats art: a Rothko’s #61 for breakfast, knotted chairs for lunch, and a couple of Duchamp’s wheels for dinner. Ms Designer reads Baudelaire, Mallarmé and the highlights of the Ikea catalogue. Natlab-goer during the week, she spends her Friday nights at secret parties at secret locations with secret people, or at TAC, discussing the Russian translation’s faithfulness to the latest Coen Brothers film.

Now for our charming prince engineer. A few hairs left, T-shirt of an unknown outdoor festival of last summer, high-water pants, velvet socks and vintage moccassins. The engineer knows how to confuse you. When you think you are getting to know him better, he stops spending his sundays at Media Market to try out new 3D printing technologies, and instead starts chewing gum at Baltan Laboratories. Bedside table books: none. Kindle is the way to go, along with thousands of PDFs filling the memory and which, by the way, will never be read. When it comes to leisure... the Engineer patiently passes.

If it’s true that birds of a feather go together, at least as far as the love story thing is concerned, this case is closed.

But joking aside, the coexistence of such different worlds is something we all should benefit from, and more often. It’s no secret that the reconciliation of creativity and logic is the main catalyst for innovation and social development. We are on the right track, though: it’s just a matter of more crossings of parallel bike routes.

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