Milan, coffee and the design of nearby things.

When you think of Milan and design, where would you start?

I would start with a caution: Milan is so strong as an image that the risk is to stop there. I am more interested in Milan as a place where objects are really tested. Here design enters the rhythm of the city, its flows, its work, its bodies, its waiting. It is a city that forces a project to work, not only to declare itself.

What does it mean to come from the Italian coffee maker district?

It means growing up in a context where industrial design was close to life. It was not a separate, specialist language. It was already inside everyday objects. The fact that companies such as Bialetti, Alessi and Lagostina came out of that territory matters a lot to me, because it means having absorbed early a culture in which home, kitchen and design speak the same language.

Why does the coffee maker still fascinate you?

Because it is an apparently simple object, but in reality very dense. Inside a coffee maker there are proportion, use, heat, ritual, memory, sound and waiting. It is a popular object and at the same time a sophisticated one. It is one of the clearest examples of how design can enter everyday life without becoming distant.

I also think of Aldo Rossi’s coffee makers: La Conica and La Cupola look like small table architectures. In those objects Rossi brings his world of elementary forms, urban memory and monumentality reduced in scale.

From the home coffee maker to the espresso machine at the bar: what changes?

I see them as two Italian archetypes. The coffee maker is domestic, concentrated, almost narrative. The espresso machine is public, performative, urban. The first works on the time of the home, the second on the time of the city. But both organize gestures and relationships. Both are design devices that give form to a ritual.

What can the bar tell us about product design?

The bar can tell a great deal, because it is one of the places where design is tested without discounts. There, design is measured against ergonomics, maintenance, repeated gestures, service speed, and the experience of those who work and those who enter. The bar is a small machine of relationships.

What relationship is there between technical drawing and illustrated drawing?

This double nature interests me a lot, because technical drawing tends to clarify, while illustrated drawing can also open, evoke and let things breathe. One tightens the project, the other gives it human space again. For me they are not in conflict: they correct each other. The project prevents drawing from becoming pure ornament, and drawing prevents the project from becoming only performance.

Since I started illustrating, I have noticed that I tend to merge these two aspects. I add poetry to industrial design without turning it into a souvenir, and I add technique and perspective to illustration. This mix makes me feel very calibrated.

Three things to leave with the reader?

I would leave two books: The Star Rover by Jack London and Written at Night by Ettore Sottsass. They are very different, but both, in their own way, take you outside an obvious way of looking at things.

Then a film and a record: Mulholland Drive by David Lynch, because it is one of those films that stays inside you and keeps working afterwards; and Storia di un impiegato by Fabrizio De André, because it has a narrative, political and poetic force that does not wear out.