“Design is planned, not designed” by Walter Vannini (Preface to the Italian version of Donald A. Norman’s “The Design of Future Things”): “…The distinction is not between flair and rationality, but between good and bad design, as it always has been…A Science of Design and an Engineering of Design are the only antidote to bad design. For we Italians this would mean abandoning the Made in Italy myth intended as pure flair and dumping the idea of designers as “artists”.
Yes, design can still be art, but only in the sense that even a bridge can. Otherwise it is not design, but decoration; we are not in the presence of beauty, but prettiness, and unfortunately this country risks happily drowning in the pseudo-culture of prettiness. In our world we think in increasingly multi-disciplinary terms, whereas we [Italians] are stuck at the concept of the type of creativity that produces surprises to put in Kinder chocolate eggs.
Not only are designers plagued, but also entire companies, whole market sectors, because many entrepreneurs are prisoners of that very culture (or lack of culture) that prevents them from seeing beyond their noses and makes them stick with the superficial and the pretty.
And so many of our much praised districts sink into the mire of what is wonderfully useless: kitchen utensils that appear in every wedding list worth its name (very ornamental, then you go to the Coop and buy a corkscrew, lemon squeezer or nut crackers that actually work); suction hoods worthy of Star Trek that are completely smeared in just one session with the frying pan; monumental kitchens where a drop of wine that escapes the glass can run undisturbed over three metres of work top then end up on the floor; rotating ice cream counters that make you wait for your cone until your flavour “comes up”, like a sort of Wheel of Fortune. Certainly, all things that look good; all perfect in appearance; then you use them and look for a substitute that works.
This is what the descendents of Leonardo and Michelangelo are reduced to making: pretty chic objects which fill the glossy magazines and the homes of the nouveau riche. In the meantime, in the rest of the world less attractive but more functional things are being designed, with more attention paid to materials and costs, and they are winning on the market.
At this point, one of the two: either design is the rifugium peccatorum of those who cannot pass themselves off as true artists, and therefore deal with small and large things in terrible taste, dust collectors for the recyclable gifts circuit; or design goes back to dealing with this world, the world of things to do, life to live, complex problems, and objects that must work because you want to use them for doing various things.