A Manifesto
Ten Things to Think About When it Comes to Design Valentina Del Ciotto and Simone Spalvieri
1
LIVE SLOW TO THINK QUICK
We seek slowness, both in life and in design. The best ideas come into being when you have the time to think, to reflect, make mistakes and correct them. Today, making mistakes is considered a luxury we cannot afford, and yet it’s the only way to understand and improve.
2
RESPECT NATURE
We consciously choose what we eat, what we breathe, what we design, and what we put into production. We feel that we are part of nature; we care about our surroundings as much as we care about ourselves. Design can and should do a lot to raise industry awareness about this stuff.
3
SIMPLIFY COMPLEXITY
We want to bring design into everyday life. We strive to make the most innovative products and materials understandable and usable.
4
FIRST THOUGHT, THEN FORM
We are uninterested in a style with a dominant aesthetic. We want our objects to be recognized primarily for the thought behind them rather than their form.
5
DESIGN IS INNOVATION
Through design, we can redefine the canons of beauty and quality, rather than merely regurgitating the already seen and tried, which are more immediate to convey. It’s more difficult and risky to imagine the future than repeat the past; we want to take that risk.
6
PRACTICE CHANGE
As well as theorizing change, we believe it’s vital to act tangibly, through the design of high- quality objects. It’s important to work up close and personal with companies to promote and push good design practice, even if that means running the risk of not achieving the goals you’ve set yourself. Criticizing the system from the outside, without fully understanding its industrial and commercial dynamics, is usually a sterile exercise.
7
BESPOKE DESIGN
The right projects are usually the ones to emerge from deep knowledge of the company you’re working for, knowledge about the production technologies it uses, its markets, the skills of the people who work there. A good design emerges when designer and company share common intent.
8
COMMUNICATING THROUGH MATERIALS AND TECHNOLOGIES
Materials and technologies are the vocabulary we use to write new stories. Starting with the form and only afterwards seeking materials and production methods would for us be design in reverse.
9
THE DESIGNER AS A COG IN A COMPLEX SYSTEM
Our profession is increasingly moving away from the authorial work of the recent past. Industrial products are so complex that it takes teamwork in which different skillsets intersect. Often, our role is to be the professional figure with the expertise to work with the most complex of management figures, to bring leading-edge content inside a company and foster high-quality design.
10
ONGOING IMPROVEMENT
For us, to design is to raise the quality bar of whatever we’re designing, pursuing an approach that is based on the ongoing refinement of functional, aesthetic and productive characteristics.