Interview with Tobia Repossi on Modern Interior Decoration issue 343.
This a summary of the Interview:
This year you’ve been awarded with the prestigious “Modern International Media Award” for “Best Product Design”, what are your feelings?
I’m honored to have this prestigious award that comes after just one year of developing our product design department in China. It surely means that the direction we have taken is correct, we are talking with companies to build their own market strategies, and with suppliers that want to grow and build products by themselves without replicating other companies’ designs.
The “Modern Decoration International Media Award” has a significant influence on Chinese interior design industry, what is your impression this year?
This year is the first Modern Decoration Media Award for me, but I attended the ceremony in 2014. The designers in general have significantly improved the quality of their works, the Award is internationally reknown and is perfectly matching the trend to award new ideas and new designs according to the best quality, beauty and functionality.
As a designer, had your design work changed in the past few years? Do you have some other plans in the future?
My work has changed a lot from my coming to China some years ago, even if I’ve been travelling here a lot the culture and social impact of design is extremely different. In Europe many companies are working on branding and marketing but they hardly design new products, while in Asia production is still developing and growing and there’s much more space to conceive news things and to develop completely new ideas from scratch. I believe the future of China is in product development and ideas production, this is where the future of the country is. Also my design thinking has changed because Chinese market is different and huge but has its rules which are peculiar and sometimes strange to us, getting used to that is not easy.
What do you expect in the interior design industry and product design industry in 2015?
Chinese design is facing a big change that will take the market from just “Producing” to “Producing after Research and Development”, in other words the market of ideas will be the market for the next years. Chinese design is facing this challenge with all the perfect resources to be winning, but it’s still a very deep and risky change in culture and society.