“WHO AM I ?”
(D. Zoolander)
“WHO CARES ?”
(R. Burgundy)
Let’s spend some other few words about a giant-egoed self-centered designer.
That’s precisely what you’re looking for, don’t you?
If you ask me “What do you do?”, I really wouldn’t know how to answer.
But it’s not my fault: over the past twenty years I explored literally anything about design.
I was born in a very small town in northwestern Italy, but I later moved close to Venice to study design, at IUAV. Since then, I’ve been working with so many talented professionals and great companies I can deem myself very, very lucky. The good point is that, apart from learning how to deliver good products, I managed to understand every part of the so-called Design System as a true insider, understanding how to properly engineer a product, how to develop a marketing strategy, what leading a company actually means, how you can optimize your designs in order to increase profit margins (no, I’m not shy about money), how to engage people and communicate knowledge through design.
Today, companies hire me to manage their creativity in order to achieve more, find and communicate an identity often hidden or not totally clear, build new collections from scratch, advise them on the best technology or material to be used, build a new catalogue or a fair booth. The strength of this studio is the strong multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity I gained and encouraged through the years, and I surely wouldn’t choose any different path.
A PLATYPUS?!
Once I was asked to answer a press interview for Interni Magazine, and when I had to explain what I considered my main skills I just couldn’t find a specific one. That’s why, listing what I dealt with along my career, Virginio Briatore suggested I was something like a platypus, an unusual mixture of different parts blended into a very recognizable creature. I liked that definition a lot. Browsing this website, you’ll notice how much my work and collaborations are multifaceted and different, from branding to production management, to product design, to graphic. I like the way it is and I think a narrow, specialistic approach is not a convenient strategy, as in design as in life. Long live the platypus!
And now, for your delight,
some terribly boring words:
Design is meaning
My focus is meaning. It may sound naive, but arbitrary design is not my choice: objects should always tell a story, and not just because you need to fill some press release: we’re living an age in design when companies and manufacturers simply can’t work on process or material innovations, thus the main content for tomorrow’s products should aim to the very core of design: semantic. After function, meaning is indeed the second more important way to justify a volume or a shape, and the universe it bears with itself is sometimes the only feature that justify its coming into being. Somehow this meaning is imbued with the very first concept, sometimes it just pops up during the process; but you can’t just forget about it and design dull, soulless and void objects.
A passion for industry.
And for crafts too.
I’m not a designer-artist, a self-producing designer or anything like that: I like experimenting a lot, but my view about design is something more pragmatical.
Producing for the masses, understanding how to calibrate efforts and resources is something you would easily downplay if your target is selling few pieces, and along the years I learnt how to master industrial design, forgetting about small-batched design.
But recent recession and global crisis pushed me to re-evaluate that: around the first decade of the noughties many Italian craftmen and manufacturers were not living their best years, and many of them were going bankruptcy with nobody to inherit their skills, whether they blew glass or cut steel sheets.
That’s why in 2012, together with Zaven Studio and Matteo Zorzenoni I launched a design micro-brand, called Something Good bringing awareness around the world of crafts, but with an industrial approach. I must admit the experiment was a total success, and the echo it provided to many new initiative in design was quite huge. Now design is much less industrial and much more hand-made and low-batched, and probably those were the days when everything started changing consistently. Will design come back to its roots, with sustainability in mind?
Processes
That’s why to me processes are so important: they can heavily affect the way a product can penetrate the market, and its footprint (regarding our environment and the market too). Knowing how to hack the traditional scheme companies use in order to produce something is crucial, and along the first years of my career I’ve been lucky enough to eyewitness many of those milestones. Nowadays processes became kinda standardized (an elegant way to tell companies are really lazy) but there’s still hope for innovation: processes can be found in the entire design system, and the niches where designers can operate to innovate are many, from design distribution, circular lifespan or supply chains. Sure, it takes time and the answer can’t be neither easy or immediate: you need practice and an overall attitude to receptiveness. Oh, and great luck.
Bulbs&Lampshades
Since my very first years as a professional, I’ve been dealing with light design, an aptitude that in 2012 led me to be appointed the Art Director of a world-known brand such as FontanaArte. From my first days there, I tried to put all my beliefs about what light design is into the firm, putting human experience and interaction at the center of my work and the work of the amazing designers I called to work with me. Changing the most deeply rooted habits of a very old company proved to be quite hard, but when I left in 2016, I left a company that had performed an impressive breakthrough, when it comes to technology, interactivity, and a general approach to design, featuring some products I wouldn’t hesitate to define masterpieces and new classics.
Since then, I’ve been directing or consulting a good amount of other companies, the most of them lighting-related, and I’m definitely craving for more.
“Enough talk: let’s fight!”
(Ping Xiao Po)
