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It's a known fact that a lot of great ideas come between the walls of a bathroom, after all we spend some quality time with ourselves in there. When these big ideas are made public though, their birthplace is somehow seldom celebrated (I wonder why?) Well, this one here is pretty far from a great idea, but you can see it's birthplace "written" all over it :) Mahalo

"Less is More" is a designer's mantra. Mies Van Der Rohe, one of the founding fathers of the Modern Movement in architecture, made the sentence (and concept) famous with his simple, radically clean approach to architecture, as a reaction to the previously prevailing (and heavily decorated) eclectic movements and Art Noveau. Without going so high brow though, this idea can be found in many other contexts, I even found a quote from Bruce Lee that says "Simplicity is the key to brilliance" As a designer myself, I've gone through alternate phases of love and hate for the concept, and I'm sure a lot of people do the same. Lately though, I'm starting to look at it with new eyes: I'm coming to the realization that our lives need that more than our designs. We live in a state of constant chatter, with too many (useless) things to do or say, too many goals, requirements, external pressures, internal pressures, responsibilities, stress generators, mail, bi...

"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect." Chief Seattle

My inner conflict began even before finishing school, 20 years go. That's when I realized that almost everybody around me was to some extent an idealist. By the way: that is a requirement in design schools, at least in Italy, to endure the years of underpaid slavery we have to go through when we enter the job market ("but at least we're saving the world" ... yeah right). Drinven by my idealism, in 1993 I decided to take a course on "ECO- Design" to understand things better, and I learned about the complexity of the problem at large, complexity that enables the devious behaviors that today we know as "greenwashing" As you start understanding the logic behind industrial growth though, you soon realize that designers are often burdened with the task of designing...garbage. You design for the planned obsolescence of a product out there that already exists and is still perfectly functional, by offering a more "current" and exciting alternative...