The mini-pacement is for me a completely new type of a car.
What you see here of course is a mini that's sitting a little bit higher with the large
wheels that basically communicates that it's an all four drivetrain.
This is something I think that really makes the mini even more agile.
A lot of people say well cars are just done by computers today.
I think this car shows that a car is really done by hand.
It's designed with sketches, we choose the lines that we like and also we spend great
time and form the shapes in clay and then from that make the tooling.
We of course see the mini graphic impression, body, greenhouse and roof.
We have that on all minis basically as a graphic.
You see the body here even more sculpted, it's capped up by what we call the waistline
finisher.
It's a chrome finisher that runs all the way around, all minis have this and I think
it's a very valuable capping of the forms and coming towards the top you see the greenhouse
as we call it and you see the roof.
This is the first time we've designed a mini with horizontal tail lights.
So far all minis had vertical tail lights and that was sort of a graphic that people
always linked to a mini.
I think the wonderful thing is that when you look at it you feel and you see mini but you
realise there's so much new to it.
I've got with me Kieran Long who's a journalist critic and also recently joined the B&A Museum
in London as a curator.
Yeah.
Thanks for coming in Kieran and what are your observations, what are your thoughts?
It strikes me that there are a couple of things that you notice going around into the Fiera
I've been here in Tortona today and I sense a certain sort of tentative nature in the
design that you see.
Even the younger designers, students and so on, everything's worthy.
There's not much boldness either in formal and colour terms but also sort of philosophical
and ideas terms and it really struck me visiting the exhibition at the Triennale of Italian
design, what a kind of big contrast that is from the grandeur of Italian design.
You see the boldness of those forms and remind yourself of what Italian design was known
for and you see now a sort of pastely, slightly invisible feeling to design.
Why do you think that might be?
I think that we've gone past a moment where the post-modern world was something to embrace
and chuck at the wall, chuck at the canvas, bring every influence you can into play and
gone more towards that complicated world is too confusing.
I'm just going to make something slightly dumb, slightly kind of silent and it struck
me in the basement of Rossano Orlandi, there's beautiful pieces by this young Korean designer
which are kind of in this thick almost opaque acrylic.
You can't really tell what material it is, you can't tell what colour it is.
These kinds of things seem to recur and recur and I think it's because the world is a complex
place and making silence rather anonymous things is an easier reaction.
What about Milan itself, as you said it's traditionally been the home of post-war design
in the world really, but now do you look around and think yeah it's still got it, this is
still the epicentre of the design world.
We did the post-modernism show at the V&A which is dominated by Italian design, dominated
by figures like Mendini and when you go to the tree in Italy now and see those things
you're struck by how little boldness there is, even amongst the brands who grew up with
those people.
Why aren't they still being so stride and I don't know, I think the world has changed.
The design world can't be in one city anymore, it's not like that.
What happened to that great generation of Italian designers, did they not train up the
next generation, did they not leave Frottigie's work?
What happened?
I mean that great Italian generation was an avant-garde and they needed to be killed,
like somebody needed to kill the father and nobody ever did it, they were so dominant
for so long there was no really a generation that came along and slayed them, that's the
nature of avant-garde, you have to come up with a new one that kills the last one.
complexity of a kind has been the watchword but really it's lapsed into a sort of stylish
minimalism that we're all familiar with, it's never been that interesting to me and I think
actually the mantle of their amazing way of embracing the complexity of popular culture
and so on has been taken up by other countries.
Is there any sign of a new movement that's as strong as what was laid down all those
years ago?
I think we can see in Europe anyway, like a quite coherent group of students, young
designers graduating interested in similar things to one another and we've had this
kind of fixing repairing ad hocism thing for now a couple of years, this year it's really
identifiable that young designers work is occupied with new materials, often sustainable
materials, new organic materials in the kind of form of phantasma mould, all of that stuff
feels like if somebody would just capture it and make a manifesto about it, it would
seem like a real movement, I mean the fact is that designers, young designers are very
tentative about talking about their work and it's left to curators and journalists to
make their statements for them.
Is that necessarily a bad thing?
Do people have to have a manifesto?
They don't have to have a manifesto but I think the big problem and I think design
students, young designers would say that today is they have no grasp of design history, so
they have no idea where they sit in relation to anything, in fact it's easy for them to
willfully ignore it in order that everything they see, they see as a kind of naive person
new to the world, newly minted and kind of oh wow look at this fresh material that in
fact may have a history.
It's my observation that most of those designers wish they were taught a formal, didactic history
of design alongside the freedom that the art school education gives them.
Is there always going to be design, I mean maybe design has lost its focus because something
else will come along.
That could be true but I think for me it's, we've overrated in the last, and maybe journalists
like us have been a bit responsible for it, I think we've overrated what designers do
as the thing that's interesting about design, like I'm interested in process, the V&A is
a museum of design process, on the other hand you know what's really interesting is the
problem solved or is the relationship made or the fashion trend started or ended or whatever
it might be.
Those cultural currents that design contributes to but they don't form, designers don't design
popular culture, they contribute to it, they offer scenography for things to play out against
and I think you know they can learn something from architecture in that sense, like when
you're an architect, when you write about architecture you can also just write about
the city and the city is everything in it and the people in it.
Design needs to find a category like that, it needs to not just be about shopping, it
needs to be about, they need to relax, say well what I do is not the interesting thing
about design, it's what happens after it leaves my office.
