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 SHAPES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF INNOVATION
 Interview with Biagio Cisotti


Recently awarded in Cologne with the Interior Innovation Award 2004 Biagio Cisotti is landed at the Milan International Furniture Fair 2004 with various products in which he has been involved as designer and art director. Teacher until 1989 at ISIA of Florence, in 1990 he founded MADE, a cultural and exhibition centre association which promotes ideas in the field of architecture and design. In twenty years of activity he has designed products for Alessi – for example the funny Diabolix bottle-opener –, Fine Factory, Namaste Handels GmbH, Nouvelle Bague, Partner & Co, Plank, Poltronova, Ravarini Castoldi, Zeritalia and B.R.F., new Tuscan company whom he is the art director.

Your engagement into design is at 360°, like teacher, designer and art director. You have this type of "transversality" in a discipline which refuses labels. Do not impose you nervous attitudes? Creating a style is equally important…
Make design means living the "contemporaneity": to keep itself informed and dawns on materials, technologies, computer and software. But not only. To knowing the new lifestyles and to anticipate the trends, the comparison with the young people becomes fundamental. For this reason instruction and school are an important part of our job. To create a tighter relationship with the companies – as art director – it allows us to deepen different frames of project. It is in the professionality of designer to understand the requirements of the company, its philosophy and the image with which it is featured on the market. With these aspects, we subsequently try to develop our ideas. It's however true that to "accept" the conflicting cohabitation between orthodoxy and eccentricity improve also the ability to read and to appreciate the other people's talent; it helps to understand the diversity as added value for the own professional enhance and for the company.

Yours decennial collaboration with Sandra Laube shows – beyond to the obvious professional understanding – an interpretation of the project like occasion of comparison or it's a practical operation of equipe gives from present reality?
The design's project today is a complex world and in continuous transformation. Working in team means for we to be more qualified: everyone his own professionality where he applies and develops his competences. Adding our experiences, operating in tight contact allows us to better answer to the requirements of the job's designer.

Which are according to you the reasons of the successed of projects like Millefoglie and Luna, the sitting series that you have realized for Plank? Which are objective tackled (of project, innovated, productive, technological, of shapes,…), which the difficulties of realization?
In general we interested in integrating our project, beyond the formal innovation, the technological aspect. Because we are convinced that to obtain a real formal innovation is necessary to use new or unknown technologies. Moreover with the Luna's project we were interested particularly in working with the compensated wood. To speak about tridimensionality means for us to speak about a fluid space where the surfaces, the concepts, the matter can be expanded in free and unexpected way. With Millefoglie we have already tried to exceed the limit of two-dimensionality of the curved plywood, working with two identical frames that together form a three-dimensional volume.
In general we interested in integrating our project, beyond the formal innovation, the technological aspect. Because we are convinced that to obtain a real formal innovation is necessary to use new or unknown technologies. Moreover with the Luna's project we were interested particularly in working with the compensated wood. To speak about tridimensionality means for us to speak about a fluid space where the surfaces, the concepts, the matter can be expanded in free and unexpected way. With Millefoglie we have already tried to exceed the limit of two-dimensionality of the curved plywood, working with two identical frames that together form a three-dimensional volume.

Before you mentioned enhacing disciplinary complexity that partially comes from the wide operating spectrum which i s now opened for the designer. In which way, according to you, the complexity of the designer activity refers also to this "passages"?
A design object, like an architecture one, must be a responsible testimony of the time and the culture in which it is born. The objects must materially means all that belongs to us: our thoughts, fears and dreams. We think to the habits of life of ancient cultures through the objects. There is a tight relationship between social reality and design's world.
To make design means to propose, through the objects or, more in general terms, through all that surrounds us, new models of life, new ways to live, to move… Practically it is necessary much knowledge of technological and cultural field to carry out well this role.

Today many companies find fundamental in the communication of their product to refer not to the product like "absolute object", but to the object in its context, in "a business" atmosphere. Planning a collection becomes a determination through the design of the accessory: to sofa's project it can be added table's project and table lamp, carpet, but also and particularly the color that has been the original and "strong" characterizations of BRF company. What do you think of this evolution?
In fact, always more companies propose an idea of co-ordinate and more complete house. Little by little, we are going far away from the single product, in order to propose more a "atmosphere". BRF company has been based since its birth – beyond the enormous wish of experimentation –, on the idea of joyful and sensorial house. With this philosophy, that introduces the transformed products in playful instruments, it has been attempted to suggest a mediation with the game, creating sentimental qualities: reproducing, through the products, a process that spontaneously provokes emotions through which we decide if the product "appeals us". All this brought the collection to give life to a set of objects that create in house a glad, colored and harmonious atmosphere.

Studio Cisotti Laube
Viale Petrarca, 54 - 50124 Firenze
tel/fax: + 39 055 223331
www.cisottilaube.com

edited by: 
Umberto Rovelli 

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translation by:
Federica Capodori

in cooperation with:
Catalin Ilie Stroe




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