Sun 2012: Outdoor as an open mind dimension in its 30th anniversary

New housing customs, renewed design requirements, change of taste, and peculiar focuses confront with a design - both outdoor and indoor - that plays an increasingly outstanding role. Outstanding as a mandatory outcome of mediation between the function and the look on one hand, between memory and the future on the other. Outstanding as the offspring and inspiration of modern ecological and green concepts, prepared to combine design with sustainability, personal vision and demand for sharing, inventing hybrid materials and promoting furniture migrations.

All this in a demanding, grown-up, growing, mature market that chooses, elects, or rejects according to fluid behavioural and purchasing modes: buyer tribes driven by eco-mood models, renewed spending requirements, expectations of comfort and the pursuit of quality, usage occasions and aesthetic languages.

At times characterized by a renewed consciousness of the self and of the world, in the pursuit of a future that seems to have flown elsewhere, the re-establishment of personal bonds in the e-era is a great driver for hope and security. Buyer and consumer communities, families expanded to include friends, social and co-housing in town, the need to restore the contact with nature everywhere, the recovered use and memory of public spaces and small social venues, the revival of the group's value vs. the individual for all - social pillars that will remain the mainstays of our future, feelings that ideas, design, projects, implementation, and proposals will have to take into account.

The boundaries of housing and living are changing. Domestic, private, collective and public.

In&Out, interpreting some of the growing wish for outdoor living that is by now a lifestyle, translated into the creation of ambiances made of inside open spaces and merging with the outside.

Furnishing systems are projected outdoor and attract furniture, outfits, and accessories there, turning everything into a relational space, enriched with indoor/outdoor furniture migrations, flexible multi-functional environments, the revival of a more direct contact with nature or with open spaces in general. While home rituals and functions are redesigned.

More earth at home - with clear references to the issues of decrease and of a happy thriftiness with Naive touches, and express nods to a pop-Zen concept of one's private biosphere - more comfort outside.

The new personal luxury founded on simplicity and on very personal standards develops necessarily through a cross combination of trust and meditation. Design elaborates, chews, digests, then sees, suggests, creates.
Dichotomy - typical of challenging times - becomes a driver of technology, with its rear-view mirrors focused on the past.

This appears from the combination of materials, the proposed lines, the colour matches, the formal references.

Fluid in providing In&Out solutions, increasingly focused on solving minor daily problems, projected towards a new dimension - design epitomizes comfort, relax, and escape, as one of the winning variables of future design. Closely focused on recycling, on saving - in terms of raw material consumption, on the outdoor product's intrinsic quality, the product becomes crucial for creating the ambiance evoked by outdoor suggestions, a sign of our time that calls for ever-new forms, solutions, and materials, a faithful interpreter of consumption patterns increasingly driven by a clear aesthetic demand with ethical accents.

In&Out and Past&Future produce a rhythmic alternation of curvy, soft, cosy forms and straight lines, sharp corners. On one hand the sphere, the symbol of perfection, of water, of fluidity, of clearness.

On the other, sharp strokes and assertive geometries evoking rational choices based on the principles of reconstructing and restoring.
A dichotomy that is typical of a time of never-ending transition, from the field to the factory to the company to information technology, in a whirl of accelerated, spectacular, yet confusing, sometimes cynical and perverse changes.

Hard times, then, which imply opening up to slow-life visions and designs. With a focus on humbleness and sensuality, with a revival of fundamentals, of the joy of simplicity and temperance. Wellbeing and (environmental) durability recall authenticity and ethics. A choice that privileges the human and sensible dimension and, with an abundant spoonful of eco-mood, a splash of self-complacency, and a goblet of authenticity, offers a definitely à la carte design-menu, where autarchy - in this case Out_archy - promotes the hope, joy, and creativity of designers-carpenters that produce in their offices/workshops rough, raw, basic objects with a high aesthetic impact and a strong naturalist reference.

Concrete, cast-iron, iron, wood, glass, and metal, as well as a huge amount of products made of regenerated materials and usage functions, add up to minimal, functional, friendly, high-performance standard productions.

Resins and aluminium, textiles, steel and stone, plastics and wood, paper and polyethylene, polypropylene and glass, super-pressed paper and board... in a mix produced out of a blend of imagination and technological opportunities, to ensure a new perception of the object made of matter, material, essence, where great things happen, and design encloses and warps matter, plays with dimensions, bounces light.

Optimism and experimentation, mix&folk, between decadence and poetry, a new aesthetics, a compilation of craft savoir-faire and technology, kitsch trash and affectation, tradition/innovation, heritage and future, unplugged & innovation, where brut goes hand in hand with a techno-sensory approach.

Vegetecture: architecture matching with nature
Research on materials produces new solutions and hybrids, in an ongoing investigation that combines comfort and durability with recycling and reusing. For an outdoor design that should, by definition, be framed within the multi-dimensional state of open air.
Interior design also embraces green living, and makes us all feel more like Michelle (Obama).
It nods to the geometries of oriental gardens, and the house walls are fitted with small domestic vegetable gardens, mini-kits for micro-crops in the kitchen and in the living room, scented herbs and natural organic beauty products in the bathroom, small fruit trees on balconies, spices on window sills.
Opening indoor spaces also means mixing their use: mental, not just physical open spaces, for spending time and doing plenty of things, anywhere, preferably with others: Outdoor Design digs its roots deep into the sharing of spaces, where the personal and family dimensions merge altogether. Nature is preferably exposed, both inside and outside. Nature IN (in the house, in materials) nature OUT (in open air, exposed).

Nature is colour
White, peace and security, cleanliness and life. The highlight of the 2.0 collections.
Black, mysterious and elegant.
Beige and brown, for leather, earth, wood, security.
Blue, for the swimming-pool, the sky, the sea, the eroded pebbles on the beach like a mosaic of the Dadaist time and space. Like the staves of a hut suspended on the atoll's water, then ultramarine blue, turning into navy blue like a whirl that absorbs, enraptures, carries away.
Navy blue, for the sky and the sea, a reference to the deep soul of things. Feeling blue, outdoor, is ecstasy.
Grey, as the colour of transition, epitomizing the recovery of essence, a mediation between extremes. The polished grey of forged metals, the rough grey of stones, the mixed grey of cushions.
Gold, the colour of optimism, particularly for fabrics and small accessories.
Yellow, vitaminic, ironical, energizing, and contagious, a lemon to be enjoyed, a hot sun, or a gust of spring wind.
Purple, a romantic nuance to share space and time. Purple, as secret as the theatrical glamour of cyclamen.
Green for a clear link with open air, and an endless range of acid details with bright, surprising, curious accents: nature again, with its colour palette of woods. Green, also acid, as bright as the buds, the sign of a deep breath, as relaxing as a lawn, fresh grass on the cheeks at a déjeuner sur l’herbe, the scent of jasmine climbing to an attic overlooking the urban skyline or to a dehor opening on a valley amidst the mountains.

These are some of the guidelines of a product design that reflects an entire system, made of blend, hybridization, cross-combination, imagination, non-places, multi (cultural, sensory, ethnic...), a mix of languages, colours, and sculptures, hyper and super (consumption, production, stress), minimal and personal.

Written by: Ferdinando Crespi - Press Office Manager

SUN, 30th INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF OUTDOOR PRODUCTS. Design, furnishing, accessories

Rimini Expo Centre (IT), October 7-9, 2012