Where does your passion for Design come from?
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My passion for design is visceral, it is born straight from my guts, probably embedded in my DNA, and got somehow extracted by a personal history that has exposed me to art, philosophy and architecture early on in my life. I have grown up surrounded by the fascinating smell and sound of old wood, paper, erasers and pencils in the architecture studio of my father, in a small court in Gallarate, out of Milano. My grandfather and my father himself have passed all their life painting, with all kind of techniques and my house as a kid has been always filled with their art and experimentations. I still remember the smell of the wood burned by the pyrograph (a device to draw by burning the wood with a incandescent pen) and my attempt to create my own art, together with my brother, with that same technique. This background, blended with a spontaneous love for philosophy, beauty, invention, and art, has been the driver for my initial choice of studying design. But I have to admit that the level of awareness about what really design meant was very low, it has been a lucky intuition, and I had the possibility to really discover the charm of this fantastic discipline just day by day, year by year, after I started.
What is in your opinion the social role of a Designer? Designers have a very important role and responsibility in the modern society. No matter the nature of the designer, being the star producing unique pieces with a strong symbolic character or being the strategic leader envisioning humble products for the mass market, we are always called as a community to generate hardgoods that will impact in a way or the other both the life of people and the environment they live in. In this scenario the great ethical risk is the one of producing tons of unuseful and unsustainable products polluting our world both from a visual and ecological standpoint. The mission of the designer must be the one of dreaming hardgoods that can enable meaningful experiences for people, objects that can add value to the life of each individual. That value can be practical or emotional and poetical, it doesnit really matter: that really depends on the nature of the product, of the market, of the brand, of the user. What is important is that that meaning needs to be there, embedded in the object we think and execute: if we respect this condition then we can be sure that we are producing positive value for our society, sustainable solutions that can enable real pleasure and joy in different ways. Our ultimate entitlement is indeed the one of producing happiness through meaningful experiences.