Alberto
Alessi

Trop sucré? Usually, for us here at Alessi, the definition of a historical period by mere convention ten years is only possible in retrospect, meaning after that period is over, and has passed into history.

So today we’re able to look back over the recent decades and see them as: the final phase of the Italian Bel Design (the ’70s), the Postmodern period (the ’80s), the Ludic period (‘90s) and finally, thanks to the recent definition by Mendini, the Eclectic Moment (the ’00s).

On the occasion of this exhibition, we’ve tried to conduct a stimulating, if difficult, exercise: defining in advance the directions in which the next decade will lead us.

A difficult, and perhaps impossible, exercise precisely because of our nature as mediators in the field of design.

Let me try to explain.

I have always maintained that our true nature is that of an industrial research laboratory in the field of Applied Arts, today called design.

Our task is to take on the continuous, tireless job of mediating between the proposals offered by the most advanced creativity available today for Product Design on an international scale on one hand and public expectations on the other.

Typical of our business’ characteristics, an exquisitely Italian genetic trait, is that we work in a so-called contemporary “commercial art”.

The term “commercial art” was first used, as far as I know, by the philosopher Gianni Vattimo to define those forms of activities with an artistic and poetic component (such as fashion, cinema, rock music) that, unlike the so-called fine arts, depend on public consent to justify their existence.

Without some kind of consensus from the audience, any kind of audience as long as it’s enlarged and not confined to a small circle of insiders (like in the fine arts), design cannot exist.

This probably has something to do with the importance of the role manufacturing plays in our kind of organizations, be they small or large.

“Most Advanced Yet Acceptable” Raymond Loewy would recommend to his students, proposing the M.A.Y.A. approach.

And that’s what we do in our research laboratory: we identify new talents and ask them for the umpteenth time to redesign the world of products that will surround us in the coming years.

And, I confess, we also try to promote the emergence of new products that are not only based on the principle of commercial success but that also harbour poetic and artistic values, a hint of transcendence within the immanence of the current phase of our consumer society.

Certainly we’re able to exert some influence on the public, trying to lead it toward a certain level of quality in design, one we believe is correct and appropriate to a given moment in history.

But the last word belongs to them.

We’d like for our products to tend toward being universal, and we’d like to aspire to making new myths that help to decipher our age. But we’re also aware that we’re operating on an invisible “borderline” that separates the possible from the not possible: that which the public is ready to understand, accept and even love, and that which it won’t be able to understand and make their own.

Such is the fate of an Italian design factory. So far, in order to orient myself in the complex landscape of contemporary design, I have converted for my personal use sociologist Michel Maffesoli’s dichotomy that, to explain the movements of modern society, speaks of “paranoid behaviour” and “methanoic behaviour”.

For instance, paranoid behaviour is the prescriptive type seen in our teachers, and our parents, where they’re always telling us how we should behave, what is right and what is wrong.

The methanoic behaviour, on the other hand, is that of who lovingly puts himself on the level of society, of the people, giving them what they want, what they seem to need, without imposing their own dogmas. A commendable example of paranoid behaviour can be found in publishers who insist on publishing poets who are close to their hearts, in small runs of maybe a thousand copies.

And an illustration of methanoic behaviour might be that of contemporary TV commercials that serve up ignominious programmes based on ratings to the public. Continuing on to design, Enzo Mari is paranoid when he says that if he sees his project selling well, then he starts thinking it’s not very good at all. On the methanoic side, we have Giovannoni who says he only cares that it sells well. In between these two apparent opposites (used in a dialectical way) is where our activity resides.

We function as “artistic mediators” in the world of design. Recently, the Bouroullec brothers offered me a new dichotomy that I found to be both up-to-date and clever. It compares, trop sucré and pas trop sucré. In other words, it deals with the amount of sugar (i.e. the search for epiphanization) that is put into projects.

For me, this is a promising line of demarcation I can identify with and plan to use in the coming decade. And I’d like for you, too, to try to classify the 12 new projects presented in this book, a preview of the next few collections that will host them and respond to our “new topical issues” for this decade.