Designer, maker, sampler
Whether we realize it or not, we are all surrounded by the work of designers. And even if we use the word design to describe very specific fields—related to furniture, fashion, or visual communication—we must remember that its meaning is actually much broader and coincides with that of planning and engineering. What is it all about? In his essay Da cosa nasce cosa, Bruno Munari argued that "design is nothing more than a series of necessary operations, arranged in a logical order dictated by experience, in order to achieve the maximum result with the minimum effort." In this sense, it is as transversal as it gets; some design houses, some design chairs, some design books: we design sample collections.
The design method is not absolute, nor is it fixed once and for all: it changes depending on the field of application and the problem it is called upon to solve. As Bruce Archer says in his Systematic Method for Designers, "a single design problem is rather a set of many sub-problems." The ones we face most often, for example, are: how many fabrics should this header sample contain, or how many materials will be in this collection? How will it be transported? Which details are indispensable? How much should it cost? These are very different aspects—technical, aesthetic, and economic all at once—which reveal how many variables must be taken into account every time a project is designed.
Being makers as well as designers is a good starting point, because the experience of "doing" offers a wealth of information to those who design. A wealth of knowledge gained in the field, which is all the more fruitful the more it is re-evaluated. The work of makers is constantly evolving and changes with the shifting of materials, design possibilities, and available technology. The goal is to provide an effective and concrete answer to a more abstract, almost philosophical question. Those who design houses will wonder how to make living spaces both functional and comfortable at the same time. Those who design chairs will seek to improve the sitting experience—balancing comfort, aesthetics, status, ecology, and technology. Those who design books will work on how to translate an idea into a graphic form made of typography, imagery, and white space. And what about those who design sample collections?
We like to think we offer solutions to simplify complexity by reducing, organizing, and enhancing, as John Maeda's laws of simplicity state. Or more concretely, by considering every sample collection as a design project.
