Reprint: R0612G
In 1985 the architect Michael Graves designed his first consumer product—a now famous teakettle—for Alessi, the northern Italian home-furnishings manufacturer. Although Graves later designed a knockoff for Target that goes for one-fifth the price, Alessi has sold more than 1.5 million of the original version, which grew out of a process that Roberto Verganti calls “design-driven innovation.”
Alessi, the lighting manufacturers Flos and Artemide, the furniture maker Kartell, and a handful of other firms based in the Lombardy region ignore the design industry’s two norms: “tech push,” whereby an improvement in performance and functionality dictates a modification in design, and “market pull,” whereby the design accommodates consumers’ demand for new features. Instead, they favor an R&D operation in which a community of architects, suppliers, critics, publishers, artists, designers, and others immerse themselves in a discourse about the role, identity, and meaning of a product well before they address its form. The products that result often represent a dramatic break from their predecessors—giving them longer commercial lives and creating high consumer expectations for the brand’s future offerings. A familiar example of how a change in a product’s meaning can lead to a change in its design and identity is the iMac, whose friendly colors and ovoid form declared it to be, in contrast to the typical desktop computer, an appliance for the home.
The author’s eight years of research into seven European design communities revealed the Lombardy cluster’s special strengths: the number and quality of the links between components of the design system, such as schools, studios, and manufacturers. In addition, Lombardy is strong on imagination and motivation—qualities within reach of any group of businesses. Verganti uses the Finger Lakes region of New York State to demonstrate that the potential for a design discourse exists almost everywhere.
Everyone by now has seen the whimsical cone-shaped kettle with the little plastic birdie affixed to its spout, designed by the architect Michael Graves. Since its introduction in 1985 by Alessi, the northern-Italian home-furnishings manufacturer, approximately 1.5 million units of what is, as kettles go, an expensive item have been sold.
HBR Learning
