Stefano Giovannoni had many words of advice for our class when we visited him at his studio in Porta Genova. Perhaps the most interesting of his insights were his views on the importance of creating a connection between the product and its end user.
He explained how standardized products fail to make sense in a market of non-standardized consumers. Successful products are not then created through the use of shape or form, but an ability to be embedded with a connection to the user. He advised us not to fight the common product typologies that consumers are familiar with, but to augment them through a sense of playfulness. His Girotondo plate, for example, takes the most basic shape of the object type and attempts to connect to the consumer through the integration of a widely accessible symbol.
Mami, a series of pots, synthesizes archetypes in a harmonious way, connecting to the user through a sort of collective memory.
"With Mami, instead of designing a new form, I've tried to rediscover the pot that everybody has in their memory. Mami is granny’s pot, it is the archetype pot. […] Its derived from the traits in the collective memory correspond to the idea of the pot"
Here, Giovannoni focuses attention not on the form, but what the form represents, using the archetype itself as the basis of connection to the user.
What I gathered from this lecture was not to actively resist archetypes or the things society at large is familar with, but to find a way to make them your own -- It's not about making the product unique, but the connection the user has to that product.
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