Tonetti's "Thoughts on Design" at Houseware Fair in Hong Kong

Back in 2013 Gianpietro Tonetti lectured about his “Thoughs on Design” at the Houseware Fair in HongKong.

He looked back at when Industrial Design was born describing the meaning of it, and talked about were to look for inspiration if you want to come up with a successful product that could be well received by the market.

Today we are sharing with you the full text of the lecture.

If you are interested in the wide topic of Design, you might be interested in the following “Thoughts on Design” by Gianpietro Tonetti.

​A brief introduction

My name is Gianpietro Tonetti, I am the owner of TONETTIDESIGN, a design firm located in Lodi, just outside Milan, in the north of Italy.

We have been dealing in products, graphics, communication and exhibition design since 1977.

Before I start going into the theme in depth, I would like to make a few personal reflections and clarifications.

A few weeks ago, while I was driving to a meeting with a Client, I heard an advertisement on the radio by a famous brand in the cars industry.

There was a guy visiting by a friend's home and he was complimenting his friend for his furniture selection.

It went something like this:

“This is a nice lamp, can I switch it on?”

“No, no, absolutely not; it’s a designer lamp, don’t touch it please.”

“Nice this sofa. Can I sit down?”

“No, no, it’s made by a famous designer. I’ve put it here because the architect advised me to, but we never use it so it doesn’t get ruined.”

“What a lovely dining table. It must be great to have dinner here with friends!”

“Yes, but you must realize it’s a designer piece exhibited in a famous museum; we prefer to eat at the kitchen table so it doesn’t get ruined!”

And so on and so on in the same way.

All this made me think that a lot realizing that people really have this perception of design and it is exactly the opposite of the message that should be conveyed by a designer product.

Design must be at the service of the user, proposing forms and functions which make using it simple, pleasant, inviting and convenient.

It has to satisfy a need.

Personally I get very heated with people who use the term design too much and too often. Any article, any object, furnishing or instrument which comes on to the market, comes under the term design, everything is design. In my opinion, this definition is most the times wrong and out-of-place.

It is up to us to succeed in getting across what the values and fundamentals of design really are.

I’m not talking about what is beautiful or ugly, which is too subjective, but rather about the forms and material contents that characterize a product.

Have you ever looked up design or industrial design on Google?​

These are some of the results: Most of them are furnishings, lamps or vehicles.

Personally I would indicate the birth of design with a precise date and context: 1919, Weimar Germany, Bauhaus.

First created as a school of applied art, it taught its students, through laboratory work, how to use materials correctly and about the concept of balance and form.

I would invite young designers to gather information and study materials before they take on any new project, get to know their characteristics and how they can be employed. Also to experiment, proposing new solutions which, while they can be taken for granted in some industrial fields, in others may represent a novelty. Today’s new technologies allow for simulations and prototypes with very limited expenditure, which were unthinkable until a few years ago.

Too often it has happened that I see wonderful renderings, excitingly stirring images which, however, will never later be transformed into products afterwards, being practically impossible to produce. And I am not talking about futuristic concepts with highly technological contents, but of proposals presented to me to make objects in common daily use, but completely unconnected to the realities of market and production.

A successful product has to have the right price to be able to face up to the market and be a winner. This word, price, must also be an integral part of the project process, if we then want to be able to talk about industrial design.

In this short analysis of mine I will not be talking about car design, even though I would invite you to reflect on the power to change the public’s taste that the contours of cars have had on our society.

The evolution of people’s taste is a direct consequence of the evolution of car styles.

Did cars got squared-off shapes? Consequently the products we were offered, from furnishings to electrical appliances, had squared-off shapes.

Do cars have soft, rounded profiles? Also products in daily use have the same shape characteristics. We do not realize it but every new detail developed in the motor industry has brought with it an involuntary, global, acute change of people’s tastes in general.

This is due to the fact that this industry has always been in the front line as far as materials, technologies and manufacturing solutions are concerned and that once acquired have been used in other industries too.

The last few years have seen a new phenomenon. Easy to come by electronics have their part in educating taste and generating need! If we did not have a mobile phone, we would not need a cover for it, or earphones, and the same is true for our tablets and personal computers.

In these industrial fields just a few companies lead the world market with the global diffusion of their products and the styles they propose, which inevitably conditions the aesthetic tastes of consumers around the world. Today we are witnessing a formal evolution of shapes, in spheres that go from home appliances to furnishings, inspired by the various electronic gadgets we can no longer do without.

We all use these tools in our everyday lives and inevitably we are conditioned into modifying our general sense of the aesthetic.

It is an involuntary form of education which designers and producers must take into account to make their products widespread consumer items.

In my opinion, the profession and figure of the designer today, as far as product design is concerned, must be a union between an expert in marketing and a keen connoisseur of the new technologies and production processes, as well as, obviously having great skills in synthesis!

I think the days are over when a designer handed over a rough sketch to the Customer and then delegated the actual creation, merely gathering the fruits of his interpretation of the initial concept.

Today our task is to supply projects, and I repeat, projects, which are as coherent as possible with the new lifestyles that society imposes on us, to understand people’s needs and satisfy them with products made. Using eco-friendly materials that are innovative and respect the environment, which optimize the production processes and are easy to understand and use for the final customer.

I cannot bear to hear the term design used improperly, if I need to follow a university course to be able to tell the time on a clock, then something is worng! We can talk about a time-measuring sculpture, an artist’s manifold, but please do not tell me this is design!

An industrial designer is not a poet, nor are the Companies art galleries. If a company does not sell what it produces, then it closes down, it loses the purpose for which it was created. It is the task of the designer to suggest solutions in forms and creation that take into account the Customer’s production realities and place in the market, his requirements and aspirations.

Having said that, I would like to conclude that, design is exactly that when it expresses the synthesis of form for the function it is intended to carry out, after a production process which is correct and respects the rules, so that it can have a fair market price.

Gianpietro Tonetti

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