Beauty can save the world

'Beauty Can Save the World!'
Alberto Alessi, the illustrious head of the design pantheon that is the Alessi company, was in Delft recently for a lecture series. The Italian design 'maestro' sat down with the English Page to share his thoughts on sensitivity and intuition, success and failure, pushing the borderline and courage in innovation.

Danny Sutjaho
To what extent does your own personal taste determine what actually gets taken into production?

"100 percent, I must confess. I think that I'm too narrow, but I don't believe in marketing. The only way for me to not get too confused is to consider myself the final customer."

You've said that talking with designers is crucial in the design process. How so?

"I've learned, working with architects and designers, that it's very subtle, the quality of designs; so a lot of my job is done with sensitivity and intuition. Some of my best projects started with a good dinner. For example, with Castiglioni, one of the great Italian designers, every project involved a glass of good whiskey. Let's say you have an idea as a designer. This is very rarely 100 percent ready at the beginning, so you need to talk to people about your idea and whoever is listening might contribute to it. My personal reactions often help the development of an idea."

You've worked with some of the greatest designers in the history of product design. How do you find your designers?

"In every possible way. The old ‘maestros’, like Mendini, Sottsass, Castiglioni...have been important in helping me find new talent; all my life, they've been very generous in introducing me to young designers. This is one way, another is that I get interested in someone's work and try to contact him/her. The opposite happens as well. Some designers think they should work with Alessi and contact us."

So if students were interested in working for Alessi, how would they go about it?

"Just send me your portfolio. We're very open to considering new proposals. But we receive about 350 portfolios per year, so it's the most difficult way. That how it works."

Industrial Design in Delft is technically oriented, an extrapolation of the modernist ethos 'form follows function'. Yet Alessi is successful, seemingly in disregard of this. Why?

"It's a fact that this doesn't exist; it's not given to human beings to create things where the form perfectly matches the function. Munari, another great Italian 'maestro', once jokingly referred to an egg as the only example he knew of this. But first, it's not a human creation, and second, it's made by the ass. So there's a gap between function and form that will always exist, a decorative veil. And within this veil lies the whole history of human design. Italian design is transgression of the rules, with respect for the limit of the borderline."

Where is this borderline?

"You cannot see it with your eyes, and for sure you cannot find it with marketing research. It's a matter of, again, sensitivity and intuition. Within the process, the job of the designer is to push to the other side, above the limit; my job is to try to keep to what I feel is the right side of the borderline, while giving the maximum possible freedom to the designer."

What determines the success or failure of a product?

"Actually, we have a model, ironically called ‘The Formula of Success’, which permits us to understand, once we have a prototype on the table, whether to continue the project or not. It measures four parameters: two central factors and two peripheral factors, on a scale from one to five. The two central factors are SMI (Sensoriality, Memory, Imagination) and Communication. SMI replaces the term 'beauty', because it's too simple; what you see touches your sensoriality, your memory, your imagination. Communication describes the characteristic of an object to be used by people as a tool to communicate with other people. The two other factors help us to understand the final evaluation from our customers, peripheral for us but important to our customers: Function, the functionality in relation to the archetype product, and Price, also relative to existing products. Our products average between four and five for the central factors, and between two and four for the peripheral factors."

Could you give an example of a great success?

"Philippe Starck's fruit-juice squeezer is one of my favorite projects. He consciously exaggerates the existence of the decorative veil. It's an example of courage; it embodies the risk of innovation. It scored eighteen out of twenty with the formula, and it was a great success; it's still a great success."

I've heard it's quite difficult to actually get any juice into your glass. Aren't you afraid that customers will shun Alessi for not fulfilling their expectations of your products?

"I hope not. No, I'm not afraid. I think it's too important for us; it's our destiny, to be experimental. All right, the legs are weak and may break if the thing falls, but it works as a squeezer. I would never use it to squeeze oranges, though; I have an electrical product for that. If someone buys a Philippe Starck squeezer to squeeze oranges, they're stupid. They're not customers for Alessi. It doesn't make sense to take care of these people."

Many people buy Starck's products because of his name, not because they fall in love with the product - the so-called 'design victims'. How do you regard them?

"I agree that we're part of a consumer society, in which design is drifting closer and closer towards fashion. As a producer, I accept this; as a consumer I'd probably be more critical. But it is our duty to contribute to making customers more aware. We do this by providing quality, irony, and provocation. And beauty: beauty can save the world!"

Do you distinguish between superficial beauty and a more long-lasting beauty?

"Probably there's a difference, though it depends very much on the period in time. There are periods where the best designs of the period were just destined not to last. There were other periods when good designs were long-lasting. It doesn't make sense today to focus on long-lasting beauty. The beauty of today is beauty that changes quite quickly."

How do you anticipate that these changes will affect design in the near future?

"Right now, I see two poles. The first is digital architecture; young designers using the latest technologies in CAD are opening doors to new shapes, new forms. The second is working by hand, simplicity, very naive, very poetic. But I don't predict the trend; I'm more interested in finding the right people and giving them the freedom to express their feelings. If I find the right people, then Alessi can help them to create new trends. Young designers and students are by nature in a better position to smell the spirit of our time; this is an important quality. I cannot imagine that the true spirit of this millennium will continue to be interpreted by the same designers that were successful in the past."

How would you describe the spirit of this period; what's the spirit of today?

"I don't know how to describe it; I'm only starting to understand [it]... that it's a time of big, big changes, for many industrial fields in Europe. Soon they'll disappear from the face of the earth, unless they change into another shape and give birth to a different kind of design."