Scrabble™, about making creations of high value from basic building blocks, connecting the different fields of the playground. The same goal accounts for the Michel Serres’ Institute (IMS), increasing the value of existing knowledge by combining it and by connecting fields to an integrated network.

Playing a game of Scrabble™ with the name of IMS’ honourable founder Michel Serres, we can find with a bit of imagination [1] the words “chemin serré”. The ‘l’ made place for the ‘n’ of Ioan Negrutiu, joining on the path of M. Serres and driving their ideas by founding the IMS.

Chemins serrés. Numerous village lanes have disappeared, paths crossing fields and forests went missing. They are replaced by specialized roads for mass transport. We are drilling holes, deep, specialized ones but without windows.

The network view is lost and with it responsibility. The bottleneck [2] of today’s problems is that we lost insight into the connections ; we lost the overview of our complex system.
At IMS we throw away our blinkers, go off the main tracks, exploring the little paths. Seeing the network is needed to better understand the system in its complexity, to help solve world problems which are complex problems involving different fields, all of value to keep the system running.

Nele Schmitz