He was so distinctive that he once chose an academic career that was a far cry from industrial design, although he came from a prominent family of architects and jewelry designers. However, he opted to start afresh rather than rest on his laurels, and re-entered a design university for further education in pursuit of his dream.
His audacious choice was driven by a sense of mission as an industrial designer; his masterpieces stemmed from his inspiration and thinking; he works hand-in-hand with COLMO in creating the future life for Global Super Individuals.
Home appliance is a way out that Marzio has sought for design inspiration in his ten-year career: Change the traditional aesthetic orientation and human-machine interaction pattern for home appliances, and thus influence individual behaviors.
With the love for technology, Marzio has led teams in his design career to reshape new form factors for many electronics products, from TVs, cameras and mobile phones to home appliances. The Bauhaus Movement in the last century has profoundly affected his idea, he admitted. Firstly, rethink the home appliance design and maximize the value of rationalism with pioneering design, which is, he calls, The Neo-Bauhaus Style:
Home appliance design should be more people-oriented. In the meantime, AI technology will empower home appliances more than ever before, and new human-machine interaction patterns are required. The human-machine interactivity can be reshaped only with personalized designs for consumers in various geographies, cultural backgrounds, and lifestyles. “Instead of humans adapting to machines, machines should learn how to adapt to people.”
PRELUDE: UNCOVER THE FUTURE PICTURE
WITH RATIONAL AESTHETICS ON MONT BLANC
Marzio, the Italian head of the Milan Design Center, has done most of the preparations including site selection, building, and recruitment ever since the company decided to build the center in Milan to explore the future design trend of global home appliances. When recalling this experience, this burly, spirited senior designer played down the difficulty of building a well-equipped, fully-staffed design center from scratch, and said, “I want to get in the working groove as soon as possible.”
The future home appliance product profile he drew for COLMO is surprising as well. COLMO, a new premier AI-powered home appliance brand, was first launched on Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Europe, in October 2018. When the purdah with the logo of COLMO opened slowly, the breathtaking mountaintop views conjured up a new picture of a life enabled with COLMO.
Chinese colleagues sitting in the audience, who also work for COLMO, were fascinated by the presence of this “mystery Italian” with a serene smile. He delivered an Italian speech on the design concept of COLMO series products, and announced the global launch of the COLMO brand. “It's all in the mind. He had no nerves,” recalled one of the Chinese colleagues, “Facing the long-planned brand launch, he chatted with me about the difference between Italian desserts and Cantonese refreshments a moment before coming on stage. He keeps curiosity all the time.”
The key to an impressive presentation in the spotlight is clear logic, transcendent mentality and self-confidence on products instead of skills. Standing on the center stage at the COLMO brand launch ceremony, Marzio expounded on COLMO’s unique rational aesthetics: New-Bauhaus Style, Geometry Design and Primitive Texture. A new COLMO-ignited era of home appliances has arrived when the crowd applauded after the final presentation.
This is a new era ushered in by Global Super Individuals like Marzio.
START ANOTHER RENAISSANCE OR
BE A RISING TECH STAR IN DESIGN?
Marzio is one of the typical Global Super Individuals that stay true to themselves and chase dreams freely. He chose the major in economic science at university. “That’s a kind of pure curiosity. Moreover, I had a good head for mathematics, and hoped to understand the root of human behaviors in a comprehensive perspective,” he quipped.
Choosing a major that was irrelevant of the artistic atmosphere in an Italian family that produced architects and jewelry designers seemed somewhat rebellious. That was the case more or less: Marzio was passionate about design that time, but the old, traditional architectural design and jewelry design is “too Italian”, and could not satisfy one young man’s expectation for reshaping the life with technology. He needed time and space to transcend mediums and expressions already being as early as in the Renaissance Period, and rethink the future trend of design: To what extent can technology change design and how will the future-proof design change the future life?
The major in economic science could not instruct the design work directly, but what Marzio learned in the insights into the logic of human behaviors became a guide to creation.
Due to his fervent zeal for industrial design and technological innovation after graduation, this young maverick chucked his marketing management job on a roll, with incredible action and encourage, and studied at The Politecnico di Milano (Polytechnic University of Milan). With his mathematical acumen, he finished the degree in industrial design. Thus, his designer career entered the next stage and he thought more about the new way of technology-design integration and the human-machine relationship.
MAKE A PRIMITIVE TEXTURE EXUDE RATIONAL AESTHETICS, SIMPLIFY THE COMPLICATED AND EXPLORE THE HIGHEST IDEAL
Home appliance is a way out that Marzio has sought for design inspiration in his ten-year career: Change the traditional aesthetic orientation and human-machine interaction pattern for home appliances, and thus influence individual behaviors.
With the love for technology, Marzio has led teams in his design career to reshape new form factors for many electronics products, from TVs, cameras and mobile phones to home appliances. The Bauhaus Movement in the last century has profoundly affected his idea, he admitted. Firstly, rethink the home appliance design and maximize the value of rationalism with pioneering design, which is, he calls, The Neo-Bauhaus Style:
Home appliance design should be more people-oriented. In the meantime, AI technology will empower home appliances more than ever before, and new human-machine interaction patterns are required. The human-machine interactivity can be reshaped only with personalized designs for consumers in various geographies, cultural backgrounds, and lifestyles. “Instead of humans adapting to machines, machines should learn how to adapt to people.”
As most manufacturers overlooked the role home appliances play in living space and only focused on the requirements for basic functions in the past, there were a multitude of irrational designs. As an integral part of home life, home appliances should first be approachable and wise to solve problems — make a first impression of being reliable and rational.
To follow the aesthetic orientation and reshape rational looks, future home appliances should meet at least two key conditions in form factor: Firstly, home appliances have simple and fluid geometry, do not have complicated, unexpected external components, and need not deplete extra attention; secondly, material should form special sensory feedback, and have its own temperature and lust as well as fine-tuned damping on the surface. Therefore, a home appliance should be endowed with primitive texture and naturally integrated with the home environment, and become a household artwork.
Marzio’s COLMO product design is an art masterpiece that is rooted in his broad inner world and follows natural inspiration. He hopes to present product textures and colors with the purest elements in the nature and create a modern and pristine feel.
And for this, Marzio gave products a charming look and feel in his design for COLMO products. The look is derived from the starlight gray on Mont Blanc under the starlit sky as the primary color, dotted with twilight golden of the first light on Mont Blanc. The starlight at night is mysterious, fascinating and soothing.
An image of the dawn breaking expresses the yearning for life and a hope to deliver positive energy to users and reach a living state balanced between being physically active and sedentary
in day and night. In selecting surface textures, COLMO referred to mineral color closest to the luster of a starry sky, which is metal-like and crystal clear. The golden silk-like texture reflects soft light on a fine matt surface, like the dawn graces the sky.
In materials and craftsmanship, the designer’s profound expertise stands out again. The unique textures built with multiple different techniques — wire-drawing and metal matt surfacing — create a unified overall style and exquisite details. The metal and glass materials complement each other to show aesthetic characteristics of soberness and rationalism.
In one global consumer behavior research by COLMO, Marzio also noticed a special phenomenon: Completely different from extremely versatile mobile phones, home appliances have varied functions in various geographies because of diverse cultural backgrounds and living habits. For example, exhaust hoods in Europe have evacuation capacities entirely different from those in Asia. European exhaust hoods just need to meet the user demand for steam evacuation, so they generally have small exquisite form factors; Asian exhaust hoods need to address the user demand for stir-frying and cleansing fumes, so they have bigger air flows.
Manufacturers tend to take a one-size-fits-all approach, mix all demands and make the home appliance operating system increasingly complicated. Users have to adjust their own habits when using machines, and sometimes make some “compromises”. Back to differentiated user demands, COLMO believes that personalized designs are what consumers need and that home appliances should simplify the complicated: Realize complicated functions and address complex demands with simple operations.
To simplify the complicated is the ultimate goal of rational aesthetics: Reshape the form factors of home appliances with a new aesthetic system; simplify human-machine interactions with AI technology to endow home appliances with strong adaptability, taking users back to simple personalized lifestyles and allowing them to maximize invisible time and the value of rationalism.
GLOBAL SUPER INDIVIDUALS MAKE HOME APPLIANCES BACK TO RATIONAL AESTHETICS
We find a special group of consumers. They are new middle class that are becoming increasingly mainstream today and share some features as follows: They are highly mobile people with a global vision; they are emerging pioneers looking to experience cutting-edge technologies; they are life makers who explore rationality and keep true to themselves. We call this group of people “Global Super Individuals”. Driven by high discerning capacity and the demand for quality life, they choose products with distinctive aesthetic characteristics. More than that, they pose more challenges for product functions in order to stay organized in life.
So, what kind of life scenarios will COLMO home appliances build with rational aesthetics enabled?
In his design for home appliances, Marzio tries to allow users to have an intuitive understanding of the state of foods or clothes, and focus more on enjoying the life. Home appliance products abundant of rational aesthetics do basic judgment and thinking at their discretion, present ideal results and maximize the value of rationalism for users.
For example, when designing new COLMO washing machines, he and his colleagues at the Milan Design Center made the following interactions possible:
A washing machine has a gentle touch, low noise, and rational aesthetic characteristics. When a user approaches the washing machine, the LCD panel lights up gently, which not only greets the user, but also shows an operating mode of getting ready. When in use, it removes the thinking and headaches the come with housework from the user. Even if a heap of clothes in different fabrics are placed one time, the washing machine can also accurately identify characteristics of various textiles with Smart Vision — its built-in high-precision camera, and perfectly judge and determine detergent use, stream velocity and temperature curve by leveraging COLMO’s deep learning technology and big data expert system.
This is only a small piece of product messages on COLMO before products are available in December. To respond to each Global Super Individual’s choice, Marzio hopes to serve the nature of life using advanced technology and maximize the value of rationalism with design. Technology is not just their embodiment, but also an extension to their life.
In Marzio’s words, it is not enough to just imagine ideal products and the future life. Otherwise he would not return to the university at all costs and study industrial design. A designer can reach long-desired ideal perfection only in the journey of making his/her dream tangible together with a like-minded brand.
His choice is COLMO.
ABOUT MILAN DESIGN CENTER
Located in the capital of fashion and design, the Milan Design Center draws on profound accumulation of European art DNA and aesthetic philosophizing of modern pioneering design, focuses on industrial design and CMF research, and specializes in exploring the global home appliance design trend. As an uncommon presence in the home appliance industry, COLMO arrives directly at the peak in the global home appliance design, incorporates pioneering inspirations worldwide and redefines rational aesthetics for home appliance design in a forward-looking way.