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Man and his space. Contexts of life

admin — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:50:07 +0000

Artemide and Moroso, two companies confirming the contemporary relation between man, design and habitat.

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.

The opinion

admin — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:51:24 +0000

During these times of reflection and change caused by the global crisis we are all experiencing, I find the topic of listening to be extremely relevant. My approach is to see what can be learned from it, starting with the basic theories of modern management. I think this is essential, if we are to deal with the current economic situation.
For management guru Peter Drucker, the mission of any company is to obtain, and keep, customers. Easy to say, but to achieve this vital objective, a company first has to identify its potential customers and then win their loyalty – something that is far from simple to do. As we will see, this process is based on listening.
In order to identify potential consumers, a company needs to know how to focus on what society is communicating, through its lifestyles, trends (current or future) and weaknesses. Traditionally, a company’s Marketing department is responsible for this task. The second step is the responsibility of Sales, whose hands-on experience allows them to identify and interpret the specific needs and wants of each potential client. It is then up to Marketing to convert these signals into precise directions for product development, and transmit them to the R&D department, whose staff have a delicate, complex task. They have to generate ideas that can be transformed into projects, combining creativity with financial, technological and temporal limitations. To find their way through this jungle, the ability to listen is again key. In this case, it takes the form of brainstorming, where the team uncritically considers all the ideas – even the most bizarre – expressed by each member, until a popular winner emerges. At this point the Production department comes into play, is asked to listen to the proposals put forward by Marketing and R&D, and then has to make itself heard when setting out its own terms and conditions. Production limitations are often critical for the success of the new product, which might, at this point, see the light of day.
Is that the end of the road? Of course not. Since time has elapsed since the start of the process, the potential customer we talked to at the outset might now have different requirements. Or another competitor might have got there first. Or the initial ideas might have been thrown off course by problems encountered along the way. At this point, we find ourselves with a product that no longer matches the expectations of our potential customer. The people responsible for resolving this mismatch are the sales team. If they are good at their jobs, they’ll be able to use the Socratic art of maieutics and win the prospective client’s support for their proposals. How? By using a clever series of questions and answers, once again based on the ability to listen.
This time we really have reached the end of the road. It is an opportunity to remember that selling and using the maieutic method successfully is not only the task of a company’s sales force. We are all responsible for using this approach, no matter what our roles, in order to obtain approval, finance, or trust – in our professional or personal lives.

Footnotes to a blank page

admin — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:35:09 +0000

You could be me. Any human being on earth could end up in my situation – that of an (im)migrant. I am not talking about tourists who give up their daily life at home to try living somewhere else for a time. I’m talking about people who pack up their lives and move to a country that is so foreign that they have to mobilise all their resources – which might, in some cases, not be enough. Grouped together of their own free will, expatriated at random or refugees forced to flee, how can we live in a country whose language we do not speak? Listen to incomprehensible words whose sounds have more weight and meaning for the spirit than their actual sense? Decipher words which for a long time you can only identify when written down? After a few weeks of this kind of isolation – unless blessed with the gift of languages – you find yourself deaf and mute in the face of thousands of eyes in a world that is as invasive as it is fascinating, because of its unfathomable “otherness”. I have often wondered about the enjoyment I would get from offloading my catalogue of overblown visions, like water bursting from a dam, onto other hapless victims.
When the moment finally came, I found myself having to face up to the blinkered gaze which I had mistakenly thought would release me from solitude. “What are you talking about? You’ve seen it and taken it on board, but you haven’t understood anything”. This is the brilliant result of a short-circuit between my optic nerve, my native culture, and the culture that has welcomed me, obstinately refusing to meet my expectations … The reciprocal ignorance between these two cultures sometimes has comical repercussions in everyday life: getting on a bus not sure of the destination even though it is written in large letters on the windscreen; living in the cold and dark for two days because you can’t work out how to pay the electricity bill; eating only the food that’s on display and ending up buying soft cheese instead of fresh cream. In spiritual terms, the social or political quid pro quo can be far more serious: the implicit protection in the condition of “idiot” is extinguished in ways that are hard to interpret.
The feeling of living behind the world in which you wake up and go to sleep clings to your skin.
An interpreter, “someone else who understands me despite the difference” is often essential if you want to move beyond this state of mere survival. But this assistance does not lift the veil, of varying thickness, of your inability to communicate with others. As an intermediary, he underlines a distance rather than a union.
In terms of interfacing, I thought I had found an area of common ground when it came to communications technology. On/Off is the same in any language. With their unbearable cacophony of local media, my telephone, computer and TV did nothing but amplify my listening problem. So many fumbled telephone calls, cartloads of illegible emails – and 120 TV channels out of 210 were completely inaccessible. The more a country develops, the more these voices multiply. Being able to understand them is an “open Sesame”, an essential password to enter their world. It is not an innate process: you learn, you build. You won’t forget it again – not even you.