Design in Your Headphones. Stories of Objects and Creativity

With Pirelli We Learn to... PLAN

Design is the blueprint that underpins all the things we have around us. Design seeks to address human needs through functional and creative solutions. Throughout its 150-year history, Pirelli has worked, and still works, with the great masters of industrial design to conceive and produce innovative objects that push the boundaries of design in terms of form, function, and materials.

ACTIVITY OVERVIEW
The course retraces the dynamic interaction between Pirelli and the industrial designers whose creations have come to epitomise elegance and innovation. We will discover the design processes and technical features of various objects, such as the Cinturato tyre, whose tread design caught the imagination of the brilliant artist Salvador Dalí, and the rubber floors used by Bob Noorda and Franco Albini for the Milan metro. We will see the information panels that soon appeared in stations and airports across the world, as well as in the permanent collection of MoMA in New York. And then, of course, there will be the soft, flexible Zizì monkey, the brainchild of Bruno Munari, winner of the first edition of the Compasso d’Oro award. In more recent times, we come to the Rubber Soul exhibition and the publishing projects Advertising with a Capital P and Skyscraper Stories curated by the Pirelli Foundation. The students will draw inspiration from these stories and from the podcast Risuona, which is produced by Chora Media and promoted by the Pirelli Foundation, to create a podcast that, in an effective and engaging way, narrates the creation of beautiful and functional objects that have been made in Italy.

OBJECTIVES
The aim is to raise awareness of design culture, highlighting the importance of the various phases of the process, from concept to factory production, in order to draw on the work of the great masters. This will help the students use their own imagination in order to find new solutions and respond to new needs and requests. In their group work, the students will improve their ability to understand information and critically research sources, and they will plan and test their expressive skills, bringing to bear a fair dose of imagination and courage.

The course will consist of three or four sessions and may be carried out entirely online or it may include a visit to the Pirelli Foundation, to be agreed upon, subject to availability.