Stefano Ivan Scarascia

LEGENDARY INTERVIEW

Design Legends ("DL") had the distinct honour to interview legendary designer Stefano Ivan Scarascia ("SIS") for their original perspective and innovative approach to design as well as their creative lifestyle, we are very pleased to share our interview with our distinguished readers.

DL: Could you please tell us a bit about your design background and education?

SIS : After studying Architecture and Design at the Artistic High School, I’m happy to got highest honors in both the BA degree of Industrial Design and the MA Degree of Product Design for Innovation at the Politecnico di Milano. In parallel, after a YAMAHA children music course and musical middle school, I went on increasing my musical competences among playing, improvisation, harmony and composition. I took jazz piano lessons and attended to more institutional courses like the Umbria Jazz Clinics by Berklee College of Music and the Civica Scuola di Musica Claudio Abbado. My Master Degree thesis was in fact a call for the awaited equal rights for black and white notes in the keyboard instrument's interface design.

DL: What motivates you to design in general, why did you become a designer?

SIS : When I was a child, I was used to draw rough perspectives and sections of weird trains. At the age of five, I saw on the fluent Pendolino ETR 460 the sign "Giugiaro Design" and I found out that this “design” would be my path. In the meantime, I was inventing and prototyping strange musical instruments made of rubber bands and trash like vegetable packagings. After those experiments, I designed some electric guitars, that I prototyped with the patient help of my father during the middle school holidays. I always had the necessity to invent and shape things, or to simply change what I did not like.

DL: What do you design, what type of designs do you wish to design more of?

SIS : I mainly like to merge my product design and music careers designing musical instruments. Design generally works on the interaction and the interface between people and things. The musical instrument is the exemplary interface between the physical human dimension and its most ethereal artistic communication. Following my childhood passion, I also like to work in the public transportation design, in particular trains, trams and metro. In general, I prefer to focus on performative and dynamic devices, everyday objects with any kind of function - hopefully a surprise.

DL: What makes a good design a really good design, how do you evaluate good design?

SIS : The perfection doesn’t exist. But when I recognize that some design is getting closer to it I think it would be a really good design. In addition of a great "reason why” of a product existence and its main feature, every detail should be coherent and designed, simple, universal and pure. As well as in music, there’s just the need of well composing with proportions, rhythms, profiles and harmonies.

DL: What is the dream project you haven’t yet had time to realize?

SIS : Sure something really revolutionary on my BA thesis research about keyboard musical interfaces.

DL: What is your secret recipe of success in design, what is your secret ingredient?

SIS : Working as teaching assistant and university lecturer, I like to suggest to my students to imagine the present - with our objects and systems - as if it was already past. Or future. They have to not take things for granted and they can critically talk about a smartphone in the same way they talk about an old typewriter. For example, “Do you remember when we were used to take the plane from the far airport instead of from our living room?” They have to focus on the essential results we need, forgetting the current technologies and arrangements. They have to just think to their impossible desires: they will become possible sooner than we expect! Many years ago some friends were kidding me because I was fantasticating about cars that don’t need to be owned neither parked for days. You would just find a car in the street, you could drive it and leave it where you want to some other driver. This is today the successful car sharing. The same was for the free streaming music industry. I propose to completely re-think not only the products but also the calendar, the tax collecting, the family, the work, the free time, the necessity of money. Another secret is to try to flip everything upside-down, as the turntable-car that spins on the fixed vinyl.

DL: If you hadn’t become a designer, what would you have done?

SIS : I would like to be a musician and comedian. But is fully possible to follow these careers also in parallel of the traditional product design profession. And they are really useful in the whole design activity itself, and vice versa.

DL: How do you define design, what is design for you?

SIS : Design is shaping the artificial environment. I’ve always been convinced that the strange experience of Life is "just" a precious travel-gift we all have been lucky to receive. The only responsibility we have is doing our best to fully enjoy it and to let other people fully enjoy it too. Nothing else. We always interact with two kind of environments: a natural one and a wide artificial one. Among products, songs and civic administration, the artificial environment is fully Designed by us (or people like us) and it can be shaped and re-thinked. Especially when it’s not exactly human-friendly. First of all, it's time to subvert irremovable dogmas and outdated habits, in order to flip upright-down, in an illogical way, an illogical world. Undressed of conventions and worries, we finally can directly go to the real essence of Life, focusing our energies to just search beauty, peace, happiness, love, smile and all of the noblest manifestations of Humanity and Joy. I think the best way to support this aims is to BE a Designer. I said BE and not just DO it: In fact the classic Product Design activity, with Music and Show are just some of my current favorite tools of the wide Design Approach. When I can, I also like to merge them. In the future I’d like to extend more my specializations also to other “Design fields" - as well as cinema, acting, scripting, screenplay composition.. - in order to shape more of the artificial environment.

DL: Who helped you to reach these heights, who was your biggest supporter?

SIS : First of all, I’m lucky to have absorbed in my childhood the strong artistic and creative thinking of my father, as well as the strong scientific and logical thinking of my mother. After them, I have to thank especially my best teachers from the musical middle school, the artistic high school and the design university, as well as friends, creative and life partners.

DL: What people expect from an esteemed designer such as yourself?

SIS : They expect from me to revolution. They are too kind.

DL: Which design projects gave you the most satisfaction, why?

SIS : The projects that gave me the most satisfactions were surely the closest ones to my passions. I last exposed the first prototype my new UpLight Bass string instrument in the Interni Headquarters of the Statale University last April during the Milano Design Week 2017. In the context of the "Fabric-Action" exhibition, there was exposed the special CanaBass version of UpLight Bass, completely made of hemp. It’s been shown on several newspapers and magazines and appreciated by people all over the world: one of the most satisfying moments was when a designer working in a well-known company in the Netherlands saw my UpLight Bass in a photo selection of the Salone and Fuorisalone 2017 made by her boss. In the musical instrument design field, I recently got enough satisfaction from my new UpLight Bass. I last exposed its first prototype in the Interni Headquarters of the Statale University last April during the Milano Design Week 2017. In the context of the "Fabric-Action" exhibition, there was exposed the special CanaBass version of UpLight Bass, completely made of hemp. It’s been shown on several newspapers and magazines and appreciated by people all over the world: one of the most satisfying moments was when a designer working in a well-known company in the Netherlands saw my UpLight Bass in a photo selection of the Salone and Fuorisalone 2017 made by her boss. Especially after an unforgettable product design experience at the YAMAHA Design Studio in London, I’m happy to continue to work for clients in the musical instruments industry, hoping to show soon the last projects. The interdisciplinary approach for example allows me to design even scene objects for people of the show business. Talking about transports, especially after winning a design contest of BOMBARDIER Transportation in 2010, I had the opportunity to design the new external graphic livery of the MM2 green line underground trains of ATM Milano. I also collaborated in the revamping project of the Jumbo tram ATM 4900.

DL: What would you like to see changed in design industry in the coming years?

SIS : Between electronics, software and digital networks, the biggest part of our artificial world is becoming immaterial, and I’m happy about that especially in terms of environmental sustainability. In the material world I hope we’ll come back to interact more with the nature, while we’ll gradually move the most of the artificial environment to the software immaterial world. There will be less traditional industrial design and the designer will finally be interdisciplinary and flexible with his unique approach to the whole creation method.

DL: When you have a new design project, where do you start?

SIS : First, I make a big research on what does it already exists trying to find something better hoping to increase the life quality. I soon abandon the designer point of view trying to immedesimate in the user with his impossible dreams. Trying to make them possible. After define the main principles of the new design project, according to technical and environmental aspects, I only play to semplificate and the shapes just come.

DL: What is your life motto as a designer?

SIS : Jester but coherent, crazy but precise, lazy but curious, extreme but enthusiastic, in the end I trust in the future.

DL: Do you think design sets the trends or trends set the designs?

SIS : I think design has to set the trends and especially to set the problems and make questions. Design should be influenced by people. Schumann suggested us to not rely on fashion and trends.

DL: What is the role of technology when you design?

SIS : When I design I like to use the 3D modeling softwares especially for visualizing something apparently “impossible” that can be realized. The rapid prototyping and digital manufacturing tools help in this direction. But the technology is just a tool, as well as a musical instrument, sure as well as design itself.