Walking into Alessi, you immediately know you are walking into a place full of creativity and history. From the colorful, quirky hallways to the enormous showroom, the Alessi factory is the home of so much design and so much inspiration. As a company, Alessi follows suit with a popular tendency of Italian design: fusing design with art and architecture.
Seeking out designers from all different backgrounds, they open themselves and their customers up to diversity in their products: in the way they are viewed, contextualized, prototyped and produced.
Alessi has the noble goal (in my opinion) to not only make things that are efficient and functional but that are exciting and pleasing! They want people to get excited about buying a lemon juicer or a coffee maker. Alberto Alessi, when he transformed the company to focus on design, knew that those everyday, “common” objects are a part of a life, family and home. They need to satisfy not only functional needs but those of poetic and emotional needs as well. That kind of thinking is the way that I would like to think of all design. Not only in the context of my sketchbook or prototypes but in the way it interacts with the world and becomes a part of someone’s life.
With my focus being on the Italian relationship with the table, meals and food, seeing the different approaches to gadgets used in the kitchen and restaurants gave me more insight into that relationship and how it can be effected by products such as those from Alessi.
