Design

— Franco Raggi —

‏What is the task of design? Unoriginally we might say its task is to devise the products which fill our everyday life. Objects, things, furnishings, spaces are a part of our life and tell its story, for better or worse.

Objects surround us. They are useful, useless, precious, ordinary, rare, banal, sometimes ugly.
On their own and together, they are vehicles of individual and collective language systems.

‏What we wear, the things we surround ourselves with, how we arrange them and accumulate them, tells us a great deal about ourselves. Objects, things, furnishings perform complex communicative functions which do not solely regard their use.

‏There are functional, perfect objects shaped by time, use and necessity.
‏There are objects which move us with their poetic simplicity.
‏There are objects which express the sense of the period and of modernity.
‏There are objects which point to a level of affluence.
‏There are objects related to our personal memories, private moments.
‏There are horrible but funny objects we might buy because they are embarrassingly odd, aware that they serve no other purpose than to remind us of a trip or a place or an encounter.

‏All in all, design is neither a science nor a craft with precise boundaries. Like life it fills our material, emotional and cultural everyday. Like an anthropological probe it tracks the limits of taste, the evolution of ordinary aesthetics, sometimes producing what seems to us to be beautiful, true and rich in significance and, quite often, the opposite of this.