Acting together, living better with less

From July 4 to September 6, L’Orangerie is hosting an international design workshop supported and coordinated by Saint-Luc Liège, bringing together students from design professions, designers, and teachers from Belgium, France, Italy, and Tunisia around an essential question: how to live better with fewer resources? The observation is now widely shared. Climate crises, resource depletion, and increasing inequalities force us to rethink our development models. However, despite repeated warnings from scientists, our societies still struggle to envisage a voluntary reduction in their consumption. The question of sobriety is emerging as a major issue. However, it often remains associated with constraint or deprivation. Faced with these challenges, the workshop participants chose to explore another path: that of a desirable sobriety, capable of offering new forms of cooperation and attention to the living. For nearly a century, design has largely contributed to making products, services, and lifestyles based on abundance attractive. Today, could the same skills be mobilized to make other ways of inhabiting the world enviable? Can design contribute to inventing a culture of “better” rather than “more”? For a week, the workshop participants explored this hypothesis through a series of collective experiments by confronting their perspectives, experiences, and cultures to imagine responses to contemporary challenges. Together, they questioned uses, modes of production, available resources, and individual and collective behaviors in order to sketch out alternatives to overconsumption models. This approach would not have been possible without the involvement of many local partners, who opened their doors to the students. Through meetings, visits, and exchanges, Serviplast shared its commitment to sustainable innovation based on inclusion and benevolence; the Perma Ferme du Ponceret presented its systemic approach to permaculture and production respectful of the living; Le Champ-Être allowed the discovery of its collective vegetable garden, a true third place promoting social ties; Animalaine welcomed a group of students to its museum and made tools and wool available for prototyping, and L’Entrep’eau offered access to materials from reuse to nourish the participants' experiments. These collaborations made it possible to anchor the workshop in the realities of the territory and to enrich the reflection through concrete experiences, illustrating the richness of local initiatives in terms of ecological transition, cooperation, and social innovation. Through this exhibition, L’Orangerie, in collaboration with Saint-Luc Liège, highlights a generation of young designers who choose to make design a tool for cultural transformation rather than a simple market instrument. Because the challenges we face go far beyond individual solutions, the workshop as well as the exhibition affirm the need for new forms of cooperation. Between cultures, disciplines, and know-how, they remind us that collective intelligence remains one of our most precious resources. By inviting the public to explore these avenues of reflection, students from design professions offer a sensitive, critical, and engaged look at the possibilities of a more frugal future, where living better would no longer necessarily mean consuming more.