Student Awards

Three IED Theses selected for the ADI Design Index 2022

Date

15 November 2022

Il Giro del Mondo in 80 Giorni - 150 anni dopo (Around the World in 80 Days - 150 Years Later) (book by graphic designers from IED Rome), the start-up Potap (a family of filters to purify water, by two product designers from IED Milan) and the tech fashion collection LAGRANDE: SISTEMA are officially competing for the prestigious Compasso d'Oro Award

A great classic of literature reinterpreted 150 years later and published by Morellini Editore; a start-up company aiming to bring domestic tap water to a level of ultra-purity; a collection of work clothes that change automatically, adapting to the conditions in which the user finds themselves.

These are the three IED thesis projects - “Around the World in 80 Days”, Jules Verne's masterpiece which, thanks to the students of Graphic Design IED Rome, has been given a new form of narration, the innovative startup Potap by two new graduates in Product Design IED Milan, the workwear collection LAGRANDE: SISTEMA from the Fashion Design course IED Milan - recently included for publication in the ADI Design Index Award 2022, the annual selection of the best Italian design by the Permanent Design Observatory. A selection that is in itself a very important achievement and a conditio sine qua non to compete for the prestigious Compasso d’Oro Award.

Already winner of the IED Roma Design Award 2020, Il Giro del Mondo in 80 Giorni – 150 anni dopo (Around the World in 80 Days - 150 Years Later), conceived as IED Rome Graphic Design thesis project, with the art direction of Luigi Vernieri, IED Rome Special Projects director, is a book embellished with visual illustrations. Furthermore, it not only immerses the reader in the era in which mass tourism and advertising was born, but also provides false but plausible evidence of the journey imagined by Verne. This includes railway timetables, advertisements of shipping companies, posters of shows inspired by the graphics of the time, as in the case of the hypothetical billboard advertising Passepartout's circus activities or the diary kept by Aouda, the young Indian girl saved from the sacrificial funeral pyre by Fogg, who ends up marrying her.

Discussed as an end-of-three-year thesis in Product Design by Lorenzo Fantone Julio and Alessandro Todaro of IED Milan, Potap is a start-up focused on microplastics in drinking water, which is based on research into the world of plastic (a material we ingest daily without realising it) eventually reaching a solution for domestic use: a family composed of three components, two products and an application. Potap Mini and Potap Maxi are elements that can be installed on the sink to filter water to extreme levels, giving it not only purity but also a sweeter, lighter taste. The difference between the two lies in the target market and the installation method. The app then aims to connect the user to the product and make them aware of the benefits of use (in terms of plastic not ingested, bottles saved) but also to inform them when it is time to change the filter.

LAGRANDE: SISTEMA is Luca Bianco's Fashion Design thesis project, a collection of high-tech workwear. Starting from a reflection on the dangers of excessive automation, it proposes a line of garments that combines tailoring with electronics. This is all thanks to the use of an Italian invention with a thousand applications, the ARDUINO programmable board: an extremely basic form of computer to which one can give orders and which, coupled with servomotors, is able to modify - thanks to a system of pulling cables - the shape and usability of the garment according to the situations encountered by the user, from atmospheric conditions to temperature variations, from use in open spaces to passing through closed spaces. Accompanying the system is a look that takes broad inspiration from the intricate machinery that surrounds us every day and that we no longer notice. Instead, the artistic reference consists of a number of cornerstones of Japanese comics and animation, in tune with the criticism of unconscious progress, underlining what appears to be a dystopian future.

The ADI Design Index 2022 is the first volume collecting the products that will be eligible for the Compasso d'Oro ADI 2024 Award, conceived in 1954 by “La Rinascente” and then donated to ADI, which has been running it continuously since 1956. It is the world's oldest and most authoritative design award. The more than 350 award-winning projects in the more than sixty years of the Prize's existence, together with the almost two thousand selected with an Honourable Mention, are collected and preserved in a Historical Collection declared in 2004 to be “of exceptional artistic and historical interest” and consequently included as part of the national heritage. From 15 to 27 November 2022 in Milan at the Fabbrica del Vapore it will be possible to admire these and some of the most interesting proposals of Italian design and, in this case, of editorial graphics. The exhibition will move to Rome from 12 December.