The invention of the Compasso d'Oro award in 1954, from an idea by Gio Ponti, automatically generated another idea that was not there before, although we can find it everywhere today: awarding design. Thus, in addition to formalising the existence of design itself as a discipline and as a universe, it was also about making explicit what “quality” meant for products, about portraying, sometimes orienting contemporary trends. During the new millennium, the ADI Design Index, now in its twenty-fifth annual edition, has kept expanding this mission, acting as a research space that stretches beyond the award, while in fact functioning as its antechamber.
Where is design going? 5 Compasso d’Oro nominees can show it well
The Adi Design Index was presented in Milan, and 5 shortlisted projects tell about non-formal innovation, between the digital realm and circular processes.
The category – furniture – is the longest-lived and most historic, but more than in the form, the innovation lies in the process and in the sustainability of the product throughout its entire life cycle.
Grumetto. Elena Salmistraro for We Do Living – Busnelli
These “living” vases, made from unsold stone products, have partial or total coverings of lichen. Intervention is kept to a minimum to reduce energy consumption, processing costs and waste. The biological covers on the surface are preserved and will continue to change, continuing to act as bio-indicators of air quality.
Licheni. Rosaria Copeta and Stefania Galante for Ecade – Lo Studio Stp
Corskin. Fabio Molina for Lebiu Design
This real-time, non-invasive three-dimensional scanner digitally processes human anatomy “to evaluate and control treatments, diagnose pathologies, and produce personalized biomedical devices particularly for orthopaedics and dermatology”. The interior is comfortable and simple, and from the outside an RGB LED system allows the ambient light to be modified according to the time of day, the presence of a person in the cabin and their age, to make the diagnosis procedure more comfortable.
Inbody. Lorenzo De Bartolomeis, Gabriele Diamanti, Filippo Poli – ddpstudio for Beyondshape
Model Information Website for Local Healthcare Authorities. Tangible for Dipartimento Trasformazione digitale del Consiglio dei Ministri
Atto interattivo (Interactive Act). Giorgio Ferrari, Niccolò Parini - quo-d for Wst - Studio associato servizi professionali integrati
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- Giovanni Comoglio
- 05 November 2024
In fact, a new Index is out every year, and every two editions, the selected projects become the next Compasso nominees. Over the course of 2024, over 100 specialists forming Osservatorio Permanente sul Design (Permanent Design Observatory) of ADI, coordinated by a scientific committee (Laura Badalucco, Makio Hasuike, Domenico Sturabotti, Laura Traldi and Francesco Zurlo) have selected 241 projects between products and services, covering an increasingly broad diversity of categories, increasingly open to the non-tangible, both in terms of typologies and their intrinsic game-changing values.
We set out to interrogate the 2024 ADI Index as an evolving portrait of design today, and it gave us a scenario where priorities are changing, and what had hitherto seemed little more than wishful thinking seems to be taking hold, albeit gradually, even in the production realm, accessible to a wider number of users. We find this scenario in the words of the jury, speaking of a time when process has priority over form – “innovation is often there but you can’t see it” – where sustainability becomes more of an essential condition for production than a label to be stuck on packaging.
And we find this also and above all in the distribution of the large atlas of award-winning projects among the different categories and themes.
More and more space is given to recent-entry categories, which move further away from the classic definition of design as product, if not directly as furniture.
More and more space is being given to projects that act on practices, from cutlery designed by Virgil Abloh to be “set up” by diners to digital services that facilitate access to legal cases or public healthcare services; to work, in terms of safe work for all; to circularity and life cycle efficiency in products as formally consolidated as sofas; to biomimesis and biophilic design, from components giving ceramics the elastic behaviour of plants to furnishing objects inhabited by lichens; to an extension of the digital realm that embraces form – as with Starck's AI chairs for Kartell – but above all the broadening of its applications, as with the translation of now well-known body scanning devices from virtual dressing rooms to the world of medical care.
Without any pretense of exhausting a whole universe, we have pretentiously chosen 5 projects to tell 5 of these stories of shifting paradigms.
Opening image: Grumetto. Elena Salmistraro per We Do Living – Busnelli
A modular and sectional sofa, which can be completely disassembled, ensures easy replacement of components and their proper management at the end of their useful life. Upholsteries are in recycled PET and the stuffing of the mobile cushions is in PET obtained from reprocessed plastic waste removed from the sea.
The category – furniture – is the longest-lived and most historic, but more than in the form, the innovation lies in the process and in the sustainability of the product throughout its entire life cycle.
Even more long-lived is the category, even more contemporary is the real focus of the project.
These “living” vases, made from unsold stone products, have partial or total coverings of lichen. Intervention is kept to a minimum to reduce energy consumption, processing costs and waste. The biological covers on the surface are preserved and will continue to change, continuing to act as bio-indicators of air quality.
An alternative material to leather in which several innovation chains converge, from zero km to waste reduction, to fossil free and vegan: “a lightweight technical material (lébiu in Sardinian) made with waste from the machining of cork for wine bottle stoppers that would otherwise be incinerated. It retains the typical antistatic characteristics of thermal insulation, impermeability and resistance to mould while using different percentages of micrometric granulated cork on each layer of the final composite”, which is moldable and resistant, thanks to the high percentage of cork particles and bio-based resins.
Body scanning has come a long way since the 2000s of “virtual dressing rooms”, beyond the “smart” 2010s to a post-pandemic, virtualised and automatable contemporary world.
This real-time, non-invasive three-dimensional scanner digitally processes human anatomy “to evaluate and control treatments, diagnose pathologies, and produce personalized biomedical devices particularly for orthopaedics and dermatology”. The interior is comfortable and simple, and from the outside an RGB LED system allows the ambient light to be modified according to the time of day, the presence of a person in the cabin and their age, to make the diagnosis procedure more comfortable.
Atto interattivo (Interactive Act). Giorgio Ferrari, Niccolò Parini - quo-d for Wst - Studio associato servizi professionali integrati
A document template readable horizontally and vertically “thanks to the completely restructured information architecture and the creation of a link system that allows free navigation throughout the document” to increase the effectiveness of legal documents, for the benefit of magistrates and lawyers, or a website model for Local Health Authorities created “in collaboration with the stakeholders in the health ecosystem, designed to improve access to health services and validated through usability tests (...) ensuring compliance with European regulations and standards”. Certainly more balanced on two major needs of the Italian public ecosystem, the two digital service projects, even before being valid as solutions, underline their absolute urgency.