Si e' tenuto, con il sostegno e il patrocinio della Societa' Dante Alighieri un laboratorio dedicato al design italiano dal titolo "Fabbricando il design - il Design nel 'DNA' della cultura progettuale italiana".
Il workshop organizzato dalla Camera di commercio Italiana in Giappone e' stato proposto da Anonimo Design Corporation nell'ambito dell'iniziativa "Italia in Giappone 2009". Il workshop ha presentato, per gli operatori giapponesi, l'opportunita' di avvicinarsi alla realta' progettuale italiana. Il workshop si e' svolto il 26 e 27 settembre 2009 presso il FIAT Caffe' ad Aoyama, Tokyo.
La mostra "Fabbricando il design" si terra' presso gli spazi del Fiat Caffe di Aoyama, nel centro di Tokyo, nel mese di novembre 2009.
Per leggere la lezione del prof. Andrea Dichiara, cliccare qui (la lezione e' in lingua inglese).
2009年9月26日（土）及び27日（日）、（株）アノニモ・デザインは、ダンテ・アリギエーリ東京・名古屋支部の協賛の下で「Fabbricando il design - デザインの構築、DNAのデザイン」というデザインワークショップを開催いたします。
本ワークショップは、日本でも高く評価されているイタリアデザインをテーマとし、今秋日本各地で開催される「日本におけるイタリアの秋・2009」の一環イベントとして位置づけられています。
本ワークショップでは、イタリアのデザインを代表する建築家、教授らによるディスカッションが行われ、参加者の方々には実践的なプロジェクトを通じてイタリア的発想やクリエイティビティの具体的表現を学びます。
専攻や職業を問わずイタリアのデザインに興味お持ちである方であれば、どなたでもご参加できます。プログラムはイタリア語／英語にて進められますが、必要に応じて日本語によるアシストがあります。ぜひこの機会にご参加下さい。
11月中に東京・青山にあるフィアットカフェにて、作品が展示されますので、ぜひともご観覧下さい。
◎[プログラムをダウンロード]
◎[申込書をダウンロード]
開催日: 2009年9月26日（土）及び27日（日）
時間: 9:30-18:30 （昼食時間12:30-13:30）
受講料(一般): 20、000円
受講料(イタリア商工会会員): 15、000円
受講料(学生): 10、000円
（※上記の受講料には、2日分の昼食代及びコーヒー代が含まれます）
会場: フィアットカフェ
主催: （株）Anonimo Design (link)／在日イタリア商工会 (link)
後援: 在日イタリア大使館／ダンテ・アリギエーリ協会
協賛: イタリア語文化センターIl Centro Tokyo (link)
[会場案内]
FIAT CAFFE'
東京都港区北青山1-4-5ロジェ青山２階
MAKING DESIGN
by Prof.Andrea Dichiara
1940-1990: fifty years. What kinds movement has remained at the top in the 20th century for 50 years and with so much energy? Ten years at the most Neo-Realism, fifteen years of Art Informel and thirty years of Rationalism
between figurative, decorative arts and architecture are proof that the fifty years of Design, and design totally focused on the maximum expression of the project in an incredibly long time when compared with parameters anthropologically adjusted to the industrial civilization. I believe that, historically speaking, for Italian design we can bear witness to this
period of history half a century long and use this “portion” to assess its “specificity” and obtain a highly significant sample of the Italian 20th century, probably “the” most significant of all our figurative culture.It was certainly not in the period after World War Ⅱ that the question of industrial design arose: back in the Thirties the invention and take-up of new production technologies and materials (such as structural glass, aluminum, the first synthetic resins), the formation of new companies more aware of product appearance, and a certain degree of understanding of the work of the artistic avant-garde (in spite of the disapproval of the Fascist regime) were some of the factors that altered the design culture in Italy, and in a manner indubitably more innovative than in other countries.
Of course, we could put the hands of the clock back and boast that with Marcello Nizzoli, Gio Ponti, Franco Albini and Giuseppe Pagnano’s Fascist creations we too had our pre-war initiation on the part of international rationalism but we would be distorting things somewhat and offering to the stage of history a design always subordinate to the German model of the Bauhaus, indebted for cultural roots that were not exploited to the full over the years, while it is undisputed that, from 1940-45 on, the original force of Italian design has been fuelled with something profoundly different that touches, passes through unscathed and elaborates differently even the strongest influences from overseas.
Fifty years does for instance represent a good consolidation basis for a long look back at how Italy proved incredibly modern in avoiding the “alternative polarization between the production of highly standardized capital goods with the consequent falls in price and the production of goods with a low degree of standardization and the resulting upward rigidity of the price curves”, a risky polarity (see for example the French model) from which Italian design has always very lucidly kept its distance.
Yet more explicit and innovative was another exhibition, which later went down in history, with Luigi Caccia Dominioni. In addition to presenting several contemporary pieces of equipment, the Castiglionis and Caccia Dominioni dreamed up a complete but diversified series of new radios in which the concept of “furniture”, which was then an indispensable aspect of every receiver, was completely removed. Of all the radios in the exhibition, the most famous (according to some, and the first real object of Italian design in the sense that we understand today) was the Phonola radio receiver, an object designed for use in the home but free of all reference to furnishings in the traditional sense: the body made of Bakelite, one of the first synthetic resins, heralded a new world of objects whose only connotation of style was the one linked to the language of industrial technologies and materials.
With a long look we shall strive to restore the relationship between the design and production of Italian design throughout the period 1940-1990 by means of the identification of three logical/conceptual phases produced in succession.
A first pioneer-like phase started with the conditions of war and after it.
“Emergency” conditions then, although not new because already historically prepared and heralded in 1935 with the interval of international sanctions, when the autarkic slogan “need is the mother of invention” had steered the project towards a poor and necessarily creative setting.
The mobility that guided the industrial change was simply the need to produce a project surplus for products containing relatively poor technology, and sometimes even for initiatives regarding non-products. The cases of the scooter and padded furniture were particularly significant in this sense.
The scooter is not an evolution of the motorcycle matured in motorcycling circles (as occurred in other countries although with limited success) nor the evolution to the highest levels of a cycling project, it involved the straying into a type of a very different project culture, that of aeronautics.
Piaggio is aeronautics as is the production base of Aermacchi, aeronautical are ORLA and Siai Ambrosini, Orix Prina also had an aeronautical culture: all manufactured scooters from 1946 to 1954.
In the end this generated a different type, the scooter, a means of transport with a new sitting position that equipped the Italians, integrating them with a geographical landscape of winding roads, short stretches, hilly terrain.
Similarly, the rising industry of upholstered furniture in foam rubber (Arflex or Tecno) was less a response to an evolution within the culture of furniture and more an “external” application by field transfer from the sector technologically most advanced in modern seating which used foam rubber and nastrocord for the automobile industry.
Nor were things any different on the object scene; the fishing ring that holds the electric wire of the Tojo lamp by Castilglioni attached to the T-shaped metal shaft, the door of Preti’s Isetta come directly from the helicopter door, Pirali’s fan taken literally from the propeller of the aeroplane engine, Mari’s perforated sheet metal fruit bowl come from the basic semi-manufactured parts of the iron and steel industry, the drawn wires used in pasta factories in Mango’s ceramics, the shift of the Mezzadro seat from comfortable ergonomical element of the farming sector to occasional household furniture are all projects resulting from the functional/ anthropological transposition of a technical feature from one sector to another.
Here the change of field works as a symbolic enrichment in which a technique with a low basic value aspires above all to the personal and private sphere ( in this period Italy had the highest private consumption percentages of all the European countries) connotating products that appear to be second or third generation to an adult consumer of the industrial product. Small specialized firms each producing a limited number of pieces and tools can only do this, make a product with a small technological but high design content. Great specialisation and little mass production: this was the beginning of the salmon performed by Italian design to avoid the clash with the hard merchandise of major industry.
Not that there had been no exchange before but it had been essentially technical and highly project-oriented ( all internal therefore), in the hope that the idea or product-invention could overturn the merely quantitative course of production. Types stabilised, technology was advancing and the strengths and weaknesses in the supply of raw materials by large industry appeared clear at last.
Brinovega and Zanuso, Flos and Catiglioni, the Scarpa’s and B&B Italia, as too Bellini and B&B Italia, Borsani and Tecno, Mari and Danese, Magistretti and Artemide were partnerships in motion in this new state of affairs. What kept them together? The idea that they were going somewhere and that this somewhere was in terms of numbers, of mass production, with technology that could support them and “make it”.
This second phase, which could be called that “of the designer and industry in joint partnership” came between 1964 and the early Eighties and covered the most solid core of the Italian product.
The chemical industry was the vestal behind the main developments and the greatest experimentaiton of this second phase.
In Europe the effort to qualify production that used the injection of thermo-plastics, as has rightly been pointed out, saw the Italians “dominant” in number and more for efficiency than quality with small production units, the so-called companies “under the stairs”, backed up by a spirited process innovation thanks to excellent machinery manufacturers. However, it was not only this, because even a major state industry such as Motedison, in one way and the other, was with its research into second generation polypropylene - supporting an innovatory drive to the stronger, lighter and cheaper plastics that appeared with the 1975 patent for the new catalysing methods.
Kartell, B&B Italia, Artemide and Olivetti, the bridgeheads of design, took advantage of this industrial climate and did so from the very first in a very special way.
Although the basic idea that matured was to flood the market with large numbers, the business culture of these firms did not fall for the myth of mass produced plastics (as occurred in France or in Germany which produced large numbers of coarse plastics) but remained bound to a fundamental concept of quality.
The first route of super-craft is today more than ever a sign of the times, because although until the previous twenty year period the quality came from technology in a projective and future sense, today it is so mainly in an applicational sense.
Today more than ever, for Italian design the principle applies by which so long as production passes through a number of operations and those operations are performed by a workforce, those workers/craftsmen/artists will possess skills that are still “Italian” and a degree of secrecy and specificity unknown to other equivalent national productions. This confirms that the quality of Italian design is a factor “totally related to the wealth of personal skills in the possession of workers and management in Italian industry”, a seam, a score of the mould, trimming off a die-cast piece, simple passages in the work process, were the undisputed “base” of consistent quality regardless of brand. With type categories saturated, basic technology in universal circulation, the standard of processing remained a discriminating factor in the choice between objects (France and Great Britain paid this price in their design) such that Gropius’ position of having seen craftwork as merely an introductory and embryonic phase of industrialisation, destined to be lost today proves a colossal error of judgement.
It is not easy to write about class of designers that normally goes unmentioned in history. Yet, writing about research centres, in this case about the Research and Development Centre of B&B Italia, means writing about a large part of the history of Italian design. It mean telling the story of the special part played by those who work for the Centre charged with the task of conducting the complex dialogue between designer and the Company; it means telling of their fundamental role in the complex amalgamation of disciplines, people, methods and skills. Designing for industry involves many different interdependent roles. This co-operation is of primary importance because the design must, from the very first, be related to production methods, and these are continually evolving.
A changing market means that there are always new requirements and aims for the product, which has yet taken on a definitive form. It consequently tends to develop away from the original conception as it responds to market factors.
The studies conducted by the Research and Development Centre on the prototypes are accompanied by market surveys which also help to shape the result and are a necessary part of the designer process.
Another mayor element is the need to perpetrate the Company image by achieving a delight balance between a prevailing respect for the designer’s ideas and the needs of the Company.
The latter are not only related to technology and production but are also a question of “consistency”.
The aim is to make each new product consistent with previous ones so that, over and above design innovation, the piece is immediately recognized as a product of the Company.
Because of this, the Research and Development Centre acts as a sort of ‘creative filter’; it is the place where the creative input is stimulated, interpreted and directed. It is here that the brilliance of the new is grasped.
The object passes from a fantasy world to concrete reality, via a production structure that has its own limits, its own laws, but also the capacity for constant renewal. Here a project is put into practice.
At first a project is drawings, ideas and words, gradually it becomes tangible, a living object, and the production can start. Here everything, down to the smallest detail, is thought out so that things will work. The term “filter” has been used and the Research and Development Centre cannot but serve as an intermediary between the ideas of designers “outside” the Company and the ideas, experiences and needs of Company concentrated in an action that involves: “…concerted efforts, risks, work, installations, moves, changes, trademarks, symbols, technical innovations, new ways of thinking and living; it pursues profit, power, the promotion of well-being, compliance with a vocation or an ambition, the construction of a code of form which together constitute a language which is recognizable and intelligible” (Renzo Zorzi, Foreword to Design process, Olivetti, 1978.) The Research and Development Centre is not just a technical office responsible for turning a design into production.
It is also a creative locus where a group of particularly creative people come up with an idea for a design and then develop, refine and complete it, cherishing it, creating enthusiasm in themselves and others, trying out new ideas, recreating all, against a background of continuous research into materials, techniques and prototypes, all this with a view to establishing the best possible production method.
For those who, like me, have been able to get to know him properly through years of working together (in my case, since 1970), Aurelio Zanotta is irreplaceable, and unreplaced, in the Italian manufacturing world. I have met few businessmen able, like him, to bring together in a single person/company all the qualities (and negative traits) of those self-made men who have characterized the history of Italian design: obstinacy in design-making, and brilliant creativity when it comes to the complex world of household objects; intuition and instinct (categories not dealt with in the myriad marketing schools and manuals) when it comes to finding the right talents, projects and products; unlimited faith and trends and experimentation of different designers, not just at a local level but globally; the ability to make decisions at short notice when faced by financial and commercial problems thrown up by a fragile and “immature” market such as the furnishing market (domestic and not) was up until the Nineties; and his ability to remain unflustered by not remaining linked to individuals or plans, or rather the ability to cultivate talent in new ways as well as the turnover of “his” designers. In short, Zanotta was unique in his entrepreneurial and (why not?) cultural strategy, one that cannot be reproduced without such supporting brilliance and talent: it has been seen in few other manufacturers in the Italian design world, and is indispensible to be able to make a success of unusual products like the Sacco seat. The designers of the Sacco—Gatti, Paolini, and Teodoro—were in contact with the French group Utopie in 1968 and their experiments with pneumatic structures led them to consider lightness and transparency as fundamental characteristics. The first result of their research was this “anatomic easy-chair”, as the Zanotta catalogue ironically refers to it. The three architects from Turin tackled the then very fashionable themes of comfort and ergonomics (the formal adaptation of furniture to suit the physiological requirements of the human body) in an alternative manner: instead of using complicated mechanisms to adjust the seat to the body, they thought of producing a form that would model itself to the body through inertia. They considered a transparent covering filled first with water, then with plastic balls (ping-pong balls in the story told by Aurelio Zanotta), before arriving at expanded polystyrene granules. They presented this early idea to the Montedison company (at the time the Italian leader in the chemicals industry and, in particular, in synthetic resins) which indignantly refused to provide information about the material or, of course, the industrial development of the idea. They then went to Zanotta, whose entrepreneurial daring was already recognized thanks to the inflatable blow seat, who immediately recognized the brilliance of the idea and its potential commercial prospects. In just a few months he had the prototype given a technical overhaul so that it could be produced at an industrial level, and in January 1969 it was presented at the Salon du Meuble in Paris, at the time the most important international furniture fair. The enthusiastic reception accorded to such a simple and brilliant idea (“They all went wild, Sottsass hugged Zanotta”, remembered Piero Gatti) resulted in a commercial and popular success that has been pretty much unique in the history of contemporary furniture. The Sacco became a best-seller internationally, in particular due to those people who were “young”—whether in age or spirit—who found that its characteristics of diversity and relatively contained price offered them an alternative way of living and decorating. The fact that this seat is still in the Zanotta catalogue forty years on is a confirmation of its quality and the correctness of the intuition of its designers and manufacturer. This was not an isolated case, even if it could not be repeated today, having been so much linked to the unique personality of Aurelio Zanotta, nor could it be compared to other products in terms of success and popularity.
It is an endless toil, set at the point where design, marketing and engineering cross; it involves experiment with materials in the continuing search for better solutions. It “seats”, between “degrees of softness”. It is concentration on the smallest details. Sometimes the results of research are not used immediately; but they become part of the Company’s “memory”, part of the collective body of design that will be passed on. In the north, especially in Lombardy and principally in Milan, design was the most mature expression of a utopian future, linked to the long socialist and democratic tradition of the “moral capital” of Italy. Conflicting elements contributed to this ideal: commercial and opportunistic “professionalism” (which would in the long run win out) but also the “protest”—as generous as it was generic—represented by objects that were unashamedly Pop and, later, termed “radical”.
