Why are consumers attracted by your products, what do they base their purchasing choice on?
Carlotta de Bevilacqua Gismondi: Light today is conceived as something that is fundamental to improve and personalise environmental qualities in every context of our life. For the past forty years Artemide has been promoting design and qualitative standards by developing a strong brand and product identity.
Consumers choose our products because Artemide has succeeded in conveying to end clients the importance of its brand values through its integrated product/communication system.
Therefore, people prefer our products because they offer a correct mix between value that is expected and value that is perceived, in terms of four aspects.
The first is the cultural dimension, the design, as the synthesis between aesthetic suggestion and designing expertise. Second, the experience dimension, which is the relationship the client establishes with the product that is no longer subjected to it and, instead, generating new qualities in terms of global relations and experiences when interacting both with the object itself and with the management of light. Third, the centrality of man as opposed to the object, where it is the product that complies with our daily life needs, contributing to improving our wellbeing and increasing personal pleasure. And finally, the aspect of innovation dimension and research that the product must convey.

Patrizia Moroso: Since there are many types of consumers and different kinds of commodities, let us imagine that our consumers are well-informed, careful, with good purchasing power and that the purchase concerned, far from being an occasional one, is the important kind that one would normally make around the age of 30/45.
Our consumer has been considering this purchase for a long time, perhaps it was even recommended by a professional interior decorator, and the choice he/she has made is a very careful one, certainly not one made on the spur of the moment.
Our consumer has probably consulted magazines, looked for more information, been to many shops before making up his/her mind. And when the choice is made at last, precisely because it concerns an important “item” that has been chosen specifically for his/her house, it is in that very object that our consumer wishes to identify or reflect him/herself.

What type of feelings of well-being do your products convey and what type of elements do you use to convey them?
C.d.B.: Artemide has always placed man and his wellbeing at the heart of its plan to improve lighting performance in line with newlyarising needs. Our products are expressive and multi-sensorial generating emotions through their aesthetic-sensorial and performance-oriented design favouring perceptive well-being.
They are more human and use innovative lighting solutions to create lighting atmospheres that reflect more closely to our moods or functional needs. They are environment-friendly, using “good” materials, energy-saving sources and are prime quality products in terms of duration. Our corporate communication policy is based on a process where every tool aims at making perceivable not only our brand values but also the well-being and comfort values that are inherent to every single product.

P.M.: It is also because of the above-mentioned reasons that manufactured goods should not be all the same; instead, they should each have a soul of their own, a strong personality, which they are able to convey. Our items have strong characteristic features, they are the result of a synergic process between two different entities, they are like sons, their father being the designer and their mother the company.
But eventually, these powerful, beautiful and communicative products on their own are not enough, even though they naturally enclose an assumption: that they need to be conveyed properly, through images that are consistent with their very essence, otherwise they lose part of their intrinsic force.
One example for all, Malmö e Fjord: a wide collection of seating and furnishing accessories, lovingly designed by Patricia Urquiola, recalling Nordic landscapes; an excellent production, down to the smallest detail; those very objects become the main actors at last, photographed for the catalogue and the advertising inside the Nordic Countries pavilion in the Gardens of the Venice Biennale, suggesting a proper relation between the objects themselves and their reference space; a graphic project that is amazing and charged with sensitivity at the same time: then everything becomes clear, the project’s soul flows freely, the objects speak. The result: perfect communication, an exciting catalogue.

Functionality and design: how are they combined?
C.d.B.: Right from the start, Artemide has always pursued the goal of designing lighting devices that were the perfect synthesis between shape, function, innovation and efficiency.
Artemide has enriched its current strategy by adopting a process that aims at generating innovation in terms of product significance and identity, bringing together functional, aesthetic and technological aspects, and allowing Artemide to keep its stance and role as a great innovator and precursor of lighting design for mankind.

P.M.: “FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION” is not such a strict rule anymore.
The purposes of an object may also be emotional, apart from ergonomic and functional. This doesn’t mean that a sofa or armchair may be uncomfortable (that’s its function), but these two notions change inline with the rapid changing of the customs and habits of our way of living our home.
Moreover, there is another increasingly important value that is prevailing over “comfort”: the object’s “image”, which is precisely what consumers relate to or even identify themselves with.

Google is perhaps one of the best examples of how an idea can create a successful project. The engine behind a great many innovations and new attitudes, it has even altered the English language (the verb “to google” for example, now used by web users as a synonym for “search”).
But what is the story behind Google?
Google was created from an intuition born of necessity. The necessity of two postgrad students at Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who shared courses, digs at university and also the desire to improve what they found online. The idea was to get results from Internet searches, based on quality rather than quantity. At the time (it was 1998-99), the tools available provided users with results based on the number of times the word was repeated, without taking into account the relevance of the content of sites on which the word appeared. To give an extreme example, if you search the word “Nokia”, a page containing a thousand repetitions of the word could appear even before Nokia’s own web page.
Larry and Sergey created what is known as PageRank, which values the role of the online community and determines a page’s visibility in accordance with the number of sites that link up to it. This is still the basic mechanism behind Google, although the engine has evolved a great deal over time.

How much of the initial “home made” content can you maintain in an organisation like Google – which now speaks over a hundred languages – and how far can this concept be considered a stimulus?
Apart from the technological aspect, the true value of the “professionalised” “home made” approach comes from the fact that many people have contributed their own enthusiasm, free of charge, so they could translate the site and browse it, with a certain pride, in their own language. This led to our philosophy of launching products made together with users, without necessarily having a defined local branch with its own offices or staff in each country.

Where is Google’s home? And what about your relations with your neighbours, your competitors?
Everything comes from our lack of interest in getting an immediate profit from our product. What we want to do is see whether it meets the needs of the many people who will actually use it. Internet users have helped to create the Google products; this is a little different from the concept of “home made”, but in an extremely positive sense: we let other people into our home, to work on the same product.
Unlike almost all companies, we don’t launch something because we think it will do well, and measure the sales, download and user data.
We launch a product onto the market during what we call a Beta phase (in other words at 70% – 80% of what we believe to be perfection), we receive feedback from people who use it, criticise it and give us advice, and on the basis of these indications we touch it up and then release the definitive version.
This makes Google everyone’s home, and it is a home with very few doors. For us, users are like friends who help us fix the house.

The freedom of expression offered by the Internet makes everyone something of a creator, author or artist. Is this an opportunity or a critical issue?
The Internet is without doubt an opportunity. An example is that each of us can become an artistic director or producer. With Google, you can load home movies, short films on a non-existent budget or your own music videos filmed in your garage, and become known all over the world by loading them onto a site like YouTube. This means they can be shared, and you can either get financial returns or visibility that will nourish your ego or your wallet.

Blogs are a well-qualified part of this phenomenon; apart from having your own blog, you have also created “Google Italia Blog”.  But why have virtual diaries now become so important?
The blog is a double-sided phenomenon: on the one hand it is a great opportunity, and on the other hand it’s a passing trend.
My past experience has taught me that blogs are just another tool, so they won’t change the current situation, except in a few areas. Recently, however, there has been a little too much talk about them, partly because the consulting world sees them as a business tool.
At a personal level, a blog is useful in many ways – it can be a place for self-analysis, where you can write, let off steam or describe interesting things in places we can’t get to, and maybe new literary talents will be unearthed.  I’d be a little wary of business blogs, because it is not necessarily the right tool for all kinds of businesses. I would suggest that companies who want to say something in the right way open just one; people aren’t stupid and these pages require reflection, a human approach, empathy rather than news, so we can understand the culture behind a brand and perhaps share their ideas. The various fake blogs I see, unsupported by anyone except ghostwriters or promotional campaigns, are useless, but they aren’t a big problem because the online community digs them out and flags them up without too much difficulty. Making a bad impression is the highest risk for a company.

And the hand, body, and physical aspect also mean home. Our home. The place where, more than anywhere else, we know how to experience comfort and discomfort, creativity and mental block. “Homemade” and “handmade” are two branches of the same thought. Two elements of the same experience. There is no doubt that handmade also means a return to one’s roots: this is true of African artist Berni Searle: in her performances she stands in the centre of a heap of flour and with the embracing gestures of someone caressing a child with loving enthusiasm, she mixes flour and water to create loaves in which she also lives: she lives on water, wheat and movement, coordinating her body in a skilful art handed down from mother to daughter.

But there is nothing idyllic about doing things by hand. Just think how the washerwomen used to struggle, as they did the laundry in the river. What it meant to sew without a machine, and even before that, to spin and weave without a loom. When looms were mechanised three hundred years ago, it marked the birth of that industrial civilisation that we complain about incessantly and yet we are unable to give up its civilised aspects: no child labour, no piecework wages, no undeclared work for the elderly. The elderly should have calm, dignity and light, so they can enjoy their lunch in peace, like in Michele Zaza’s portraits of his parents: a farmhouse table and two solemn figures sanctified in black and white. In their own home. With their own food. With their son, whoever he had become, that boy who had reaped his fortune overseas during the 1970s.

Visual art has recorded everything, as is always the case: the tyranny of machines – the camera, for example, whose proud objectivity can be depressing; but also the obvious, banal, even ridiculous idea of an impossible return to the past. We know the frontier that non-Western countries need to cross: they need to make sure that even things that are made by hand are an achievement that deserves recognition, a pleasure, a sign of quality, rather than a burden or a mark of exploitation. The true meaning of “made by hand” is – or rather, it was during the early 1980s – immersing yourself in the childish pleasure of “messing” with materials, colours, life. Without rhetoric, but with stark realism, we can only hope that the world’s children can all “make things at home” for pleasure, and not because they are forced to work for slave wages.

To quote from one of your statements: “If consideration is given to where a work is sited then the work cannot be moved elsewhere but must necessarily perish once the exhibit is over”. Does this mean that “place” itself becomes the work of art?
Not precisely. What I meant to say is that a work is made to fit into a given context. The work and its location come to be tightly bound one to the other and do not brook being separated. A work may of course be taken down and away. But it cannot be set up elsewhere, for it simply wouldn’t belong, while the place where it stood will revert 
to what it was. Essentially, the idea is that the presence of a work of art in any location changes the setting and once it has changed what caused it to change becomes part and parcel of that setting. Whether the work be left in place for decades, as in the case of a public monument, or for a month or for whatever the short time of an exhibition may be, once the objects, forms and signs that go to make up the new setting are taken down they simply cannot be set up elsewhere. The kind of works I’m talking about are those I generally call in situ.

Are there settings that you find stimulating and others not? What is it in a setting that elicits your creative powers?
Your question calls for an answer that may be interpreted in two different ways. Like anyone else, there are places I like and others I don’t. But I may be called on to work in either. In most cases the proposal is put forward by an individual, regardless of whether the proposed space be a public or private venue, a museum or a collector’s premises. What really interests me is the challenge that a place totally foreign to me affords. When I accept a commission it isn’t necessarily because I like the place where I’m to work. Some I do and I feel them stimulating and inviting. Others are refractory, uninteresting, dull. Be it as it may, when I set to work in them I leave whatever mood they may elicit out of my work. If the idea I’m working on proves unsuitable to the setting, or unfeasible in the context, or a 
potential hindrance to those who have to occupy the space where the work is to be located, then I may reject it. In any case, with regards the place itself in which I’m called to operate, I concentrate on what can actually be done in it, regardless of whether the location be prestigious, anonymous, lack-lustre, or even repellent. My feelings for the place don’t make myself accepting or refusing it. It is clear on the other hand that the place will affect what I will do in it.

People conduct their lives within given settings, at work, at home, at school. Can there be a form of art suitable for everyday living, capable of fitting in with routine and commonplace activities?
As far as I’m concerned that’s precisely one of the motives inspiring my work, and it’s been that way for more than thirty-five years now. My first concern when I undertake a new job is to prove to myself as much as to others the viability of artistic endeavour in a non-artistic context; that’s definitely what interests me most. 
I feel there’s greater general awareness on these issues now than twenty-five years ago, so there are far more opportunities today for the artist to work in the urban landscape for example. 
I think, or at least I hope, that this trend is bound to continue to growe. There are several reasons, I believe, for which this is the best way for an artist to work today. In the first place, it obliges the artist to think of artistic endeavour in a different way, outside the context of a museum. It will be interesting to watch developments. Not that the museum doesn’t interest me. Indeed, it interests me a great deal, but it currently has severe limitations, especially as far as continual public involvement is concerned. The best opportunity for the artist to relate to the public is afforded by those places that are commonly shared by all, such as the city in general, or even other venues such as offices and the like. But that’s another story. Anyway, to stick to the city at large and those places in it where people dwell, meet, work, and, when possible, dream even, the work of art in such contexts takes on a new meaning. Actually, it recovers a dimension it still had up to a century and a half ago, not to speak of five centuries ago. It’s a dimension that’s been overlooked in the last hundred years or so but that’s at last become viable again. Personally, what fascinates me aside from the opportunity of working in a public square and being amidst the public as such is the fact that the whole idea of artistic production gets submitted to radical revision. The street doesn’t allow for the same kind of freedom as the museum. It entails another kind of artistic freedom whose potential still needs to be fully disclosed. Easy or difficult as it may be, it’s without a doubt a fascinating challenge.

Interview by Ariella Risch

Until a few years ago there were standard venues in which our day to day lives were played out, such as the home, the shop floor or office, the pub, and so on. What’s the current scenario like?
There’s always been a classification of spaces and uses for which they are intended, especially in Western civilisations. The requirements of living in society have not however always coincided with such classifications. It’s not only in the last ten years that people have been eating in public venues and delivering talks in private places.

Defining a space by what it contains is difficult then, is it?
In recent years, a bit behind other European countries, large containers with prevalently commercial functions have sprung up all over Italy as well. These omnivorous spaces are outlets for all sorts of products and full of attractions and amusements. With their controlled environments and artificial climates, entrances and exits they seem to function as a world apart. But when everyday life breaks into these worlds apart new ways of relating to and using them unexpectedly emerge. The shopping itch may combine with a desire for other leisure activities or for entertainment even so that the boundaries between these functions tend to shift in a process of continual reshuffling.

How would you define “nonplace”?
I feel the concept’s misplaced. There are really no such things as “non-places”. The nature of any place depends on the relationships among its occupants. A place is established as such wherever people interact with one another.
Its meaning changes according to how it is used by its occupants as well as by how their moods change.

Do you feel that the architectural features of these places and the designer objects with which they are fitted out affect the quality of these relationships?
What we’re attempting to do through Domus is to put all facets of everyday living firmly back into architecture. As we’re all well aware, there’s some architecture that manages to condition what occurs within its bounds, while there’s other architecture that works like a sort of a platform wholly detached from what goes on about it, a neutral setting open to any use or event.

What’s your definition of an “imitation”?
Making a replica of something is part of the designer’s task. Actually, all our work is based on imitating. We always start out from semi-processed items and work on them in a sort of hobby-work, do-ityourself- like way. It’s a very difficult job, because we have to be able to recognise the intrinsic originality of all the parts and components making up the final product. It’s not merely a miscellaneous concoction but a contrived combination of designermade products.

So, are you saying there’s no way to avoid ending up being glutted by more and more “copies”?
Conveying an image, a piece of information, or a style motif even entails such a vastly intricate process that any production project that aims to be original is necessarily the outcome of a work of assembly. After all, what’s not a copy of something else? What’s important is not to limit oneself to making a plain and straight copy of something that already exists but to give it added value by making a creative quantum leap.
What’s to be avoided is mere duplication without anything on top of what’s already there, or worse still a depreciation of meaning. That would be copying in a more superficial and less appreciative sense.

Interview by Fabio Pornaro