March 19, 2009.
As a designer, it is easy to get bogged down by so many aspects of day to day work. There’s the tedium of detail finalization, the heaviness of design morality and the pressures of working within the confines of the commercial world, to name a few. Every once in a while there are those glorious moments where design transcends all of it and reminds you why you got into it in the first place.  “A Conversation with Alberto Alessi”, the recent event at The Times Center, March 3, was one such moment. During an unconventional Q&A formatted lecture-interview, the design icon Alberto Alessi, CEO and Director of Design Management for the world renowned manufacturer Alessi SPA (http://www.alessi.com), shared his insight on a wide range of topics through conversations with Pilar Viladis, Design editor for T, The New York Times Style Magazine.

He began by discussing the Italian design factories that emerged in the late 1940’s - 50’s as a result of the evolution of industrialization. He described this emergence as a phenomenon that enabled the creation of products that also serve as what he calls “art multiples”, or functional products embodied in sculptural, expressive forms.

Unlike many design professionals, Mr. Alessi is very clear about where he stands on the subject of the “rock star” designer. He loves ‘em. He believes in design as authorship and has built his empire from a philosophy of granting his designers the freedom to explore, create and take risks. He discussed how he had chosen the likes of Sotsass, Castiglioni, Sapper, and Mendini, strong personalities that left an important mark. When referring to Alessandro Mendini, the designer responsible for pieces such as the and the “Coffee and Tea Piazza” and the “Anna G.” corkscrew, he recounted a story of how the designer was proud of the fact that his objects didn’t sell.  In discussing the Sapper kettle, Alessi described the designer’s desire to capture a memory from his childhood in the form of a tune from Germany that would play when the tea was ready and offer a soft alternative to the harsh whistles that were standard on tea kettles at the time. The whistle on the kettle, he explained, has an intrinsic and valuable “poetic function” that was worth the effort of tracking down the perfect metalworker to reproduce the component. (Throughout the evening, Alessi referred back to the whistle, and, at one point, stood up and “performed” the tea kettle tune with the component as his instrument.) Other anecdotes included the story of Aldo Rossi’s pot for cooking a “cubic tomato”, and how inspiration for the iconic 1989 Starck juicer came from his squeezing lemon while he was eating octopus.

Perhaps the most encouraging moment was Mr. Alessi’s bold admission that he is “very proud of [his] fiascos”. He explained that the company upholds the theory that the way to create products that “people will love and buy” to is to live on the borderline that separates “the area of the possible from the area of the impossible”. He discussed his goals of continually staying close to that borderline while trying to avoid too many transgressions into the impossible area, and always respecting the value of intuition and taking risks. “Fiascos,” he explained, are the only way to truly see where the borderline is or was, and thus are a necessary part of the product development process.

As the discussion continued, the idea of value in design arose, and Mr. Alessi described four distinct values that objects have:
- Functional value: whether or not a product performs some specific task, such as a chair holding up a person
- Status value: How an object displays a certain standing in society, such as a Rolex
- Style value:  The overall character of the object
- Poetic value: How objects represent users’ personal ideas and emotions, or, as Alessi put it, “The daily theater of their lives”

He weighed in on the popular “form follows function” mantra by stating that, “there will always he a gap between form and function and this is precisely where the designer works”.

The session concluded with the message that Mr. Alessi would like his company to constantly redefine itself. He said that very 10 years he tries to find a “meta project”, which means that the world can look forward to more near impossible possibilities.

Shortly after the New York event, Mr. Alessi also appeared at Cranbrook on March 8 in an session entitled, “"The History of Alessi, 1921-2008, and the phenomenon of Italian Design Factories”

Carla Diana, Cranbrook 3D ‘00
www.carladiana.com
www.spankdesign.com
www.repercussion.org