An interview by Alice Cherubini on Its Machina Lonati Website
The Green Product Designer is an innovative professional who, through his or her work, can combine different needs and objectives through the manufacture of objects that respond to human needs, without forgetting their functionality and aesthetics and keeping a high focus on the issues of sustainability of materials, waste reduction, progressive renewal of production technologies and work ethics.
To better define the role of this professional in the modern context, we asked Tobia Repossi, an architect who is involved in industrial design worldwide, for help: “I have a studio that works between Italy and China, in Shenzhen, in the cradle of Asia’s Silicon Valley. We mainly deal with products that go into production with a fairly high number of units. Often these are consumer electronics, things that are connected to others via WiFi and Bluetooth and are sold on Amazon, on Radioshack, in large retail chains or Apple stores.”
You are a lecturer in the Green Product Designer track where you cover Design Thinking, Rendering and New Generation Products, Services and Processes. What role does sustainability play in the course?
“I say this almost polemically: the word green is so important that it should disappear, it should be so inherent that it should be taken for granted. It would be like writing a “moving-car: just as a car is supposed to move, today you have to imagine that the designer is asking serious questions about the future and the ethics of what he or she is doing. The impact of us designers is crazy: the moment we design a new product and it is printed in hundreds of thousands of units the effect is huge, so better be good, it has to be done well.”
What do you try to convey to students in your classes?
“I teach the students that entire encyclopedias have been written over the years dedicated to design methodologies and methods of coming up with ideas, but that the process of generating innovative thinking and project management is codified, managerial, tied to numbers and performance, so there are no romantic, extremely creative or unregulated aspects.
I also teach that the difference between a design professional and a person with an idea in the garage is simple: we can design a hair dryer today, a refrigerator tomorrow, and a supercar the next day. I teach them that we can’t know everything about refrigerators, supercars or hair dryers, but there are ways to untangle the different fields in which design is applied.”
The world of design, therefore, is configured as a changing environment, where professionals must be able to effectively use universal tools and systems by adapting them to the characteristics of each project. For this reason, companies are looking for operational figures, product men and women, who can translate the sketch worked out on a restaurant napkin into a tangible product, solving critical production issues.
Several skills are needed to be able to interpret the creative language and make it a reality.
What are the most important skills, even from the perspective of a changing industry?
“There are executive skills, trivially modelling skills, and cultural skills that involve knowledge of production techniques and materials. Then we are also starting to see some empathic skills projected into the future, such as the relationship with the planet: you need to ask concrete questions about where that piece of plastic is going, who is assembling it, the conditions under which it is assembled, what the life of the product is, and whether you really need to produce it.”
In this perspective involving different countries, many people and a dense system of production and trade relationships, what role will Product Designers play?
“Looking to the future, it will be increasingly important to be able to manage complex ecosystems, both temporally and geographically. There is a lot of talk about cloud, sharing, which are not just ‘little words’ in our world, but operational realities. In fact, from a practical point of view, most of our projects come from entrepreneurs who are in Silicon Valley, Americans, Egyptians or Lebanese, who ask us Italians to think about the design of a certain product. We call a plastic manufacturer in Malaysia, an electronics manufacturer in India or Vietnam, then everything is assembled in China, the packaging is made, shipped to Hong Kong and from there all over the world. This is an absolutely normal condition. Time to market? A few weeks, the margin of error is reduced to zero. In this context, the ability to understand cultures, communicate using different languages, be connected, and stay flexible, is critical. Being sharing today is no longer just getting in front of the computer and sending an email, but much more.”
There is another important aspect that emerges just from your way of dealing with design: passion.
“Maybe it’s the white hair that leads me to this somewhat romantic digression, but the product also has to be made with a little bit of love. When you buy an Apple product, for example, and then you take it apart and look inside, you see that someone took care of aspects that they might have overlooked. You can also see it in certain automobiles: if you open the hood of a Lamborghini you see that inside are the little hands of very good people who put in much more than hours of work. Passion turns into a beastly marketing weapon for these kinds of companies, and I try to convey to the kids all these aspects that are essential in our approach to design.”
Inside the ITS classrooms, moreover, students have the opportunity to engage with teachers who come from the world of work so they gain knowledge that is extremely linked to the market precisely because it is the teachers themselves who bring into the classroom contact with companies, the freshness of what they made the week before, the technologies and R&D of the most innovative companies. “In this course then there are teachers such as Giovanni Tomasini and Marcello Ziliani, renowned designers that the world envies us; in my own small way I do something too! In short, these young people have the opportunity to deal with personalities that they do not find outside ITS and learn precisely from us the knowledge of the field.”
The perception of all these elements, which are as concrete and real as ever, thanks to the essential contribution of the teachers, gives the students of the Green Product Designer path a window through which to observe industrial design, try to understand it, know it and explore it in all its forms, from technology to craftsmanship.
Indeed, in the future, they will be the creators of this world that changes, connects people, and unites countries and cultures, but above all that must be safeguarded and protected, including through a conscious and innovative approach to industrial production.
