Milan, Thursday 10:00 a.m.

Milan, the world capital of fashion and design. This link between fashion and design seems to merge the two disciplines, blending their environments and dynamics. There is one person, however, who wants to keep them well separated, critiquing his own circle of designers: Enzo Mari. First and foremost an artist, and then a designer at international level, to many of us some of the objects designed by Mari lie, perhaps unawarely, in our imagination.

The answer he gives to the question “DO DESIGNERS CREATE OPPORTUNITIES TO EXPERIENCE DAILY LIFE IN A DIFFERENT WAY?” is the first of a series of clear and only hypothesis is to refrain from working at projects. Admittedly, I accept requests from manufacturers, albeit maintaining a certain supervising role to avoid drifting into the pure search for attractive shapes, into meaningless and polluting styling.
My role is “similar to that of a trade unionist who realistically negotiates that which is negotiable”. I pay great attention to the entire production cycle, trying to influence some of the choices determining the quality of the product. I am on the factory’s side, not the shop’s. Producers heed to the needs of all those who are involved in the productive process, traders need only to sell! Therefore, the quality of a project goes beyond the reasons of reciprocity between shape and function: quality is the sum of all process related implications. In an attempt to make ideas more understandable, if a product is the result of a group of inexorable clarifications.
“I do not intend to pollute the world persons collaborating together, belonging to the entire productive process, where every individual plays a given role, they will all “feel the product”, understanding its complex reasons.
Funnily enough, a “good” project, a quality project, is the one that changes people’s habits, unfortunately good projects have often been commercial failures. Thus, one could gather that people strongly resist changing their habits. From the moment design became a part of marketing, values were with further useless information… the disrupted as a consequence.
The very idea of “commodity” should be reconsidered from a new viewpoint, I’m not blaming any specific object, I simply do not accept the logic whereby a philosopher should write a book a year or a designer should continuously design objects that will generate new trends. This can only produce two very bad results: on the one hand, it turns ideas into commodities, while on the other it increases the number of dump piles in the world…”.