Alessi Product Design

• Interaction Design

Project Role

• Concept Development
• Design Research
• Prototyping

Brief
The culmination of precedent studies and research on design companies in our third-year design class lead to a final project in conceptualizing an interactive product and storefront brandscape for a selected design company. The brand of ALESSI, a famous Italian household product design company was assigned to our team.

Process
We began by presenting everything we knew about the ALESSI brand – their history, impact on the design community, their product line, and where the company is headed.

At that time, ALESSI launched a number of “colorful, vibrant, and fun” products by designers like Stefano Giovannoni and Alessandro Mendini. Many of the products communicated the value and mission of ALESSI to transform functions ascribed to objects into an opportunity that improves a consumer’s perception of the world. It’s interlinked with meaningful activity and a degree of innovation, experimentation, and creativity.

ALESSI creates items to be cherished both for what they do and for what they are. There’s significant devotion to beauty of objects, sometimes creating an emotional bond with. A major characteristic of their products is the pleasure of use and the affection built in interacting with the object.

Delivery
The SQUISITO garbage can is a conceptual idea of an expandable garbage can. With the function of a growing garbage can already set, the notion of making it a creature gave the garbage can an expression that longed for more food. As its fed more, it naturally grows taller.

The SQUISITO family set was also designed to accompany the original garbage can. Our team acknowledged different use and purposes for ‘bins’ therefore different SQUISITO members, with different characteristics, were developed.

For the storefront brandscape portion, we modeled a retail store for ALESSI which had to reflect the company’s values and mix in interactions that would enhance the customer experience. This project was selected, as one of the few Interaction Design projects, to be at the annual Simon Fraser University Employer Open House, where students could showcase their projects to the public and potential employers.

Two years after our project, a product was blogged about on a popular gadget site which is almost identical to our SQUISITO product. View the product here.

Collaborators