Give your smartphone the right place. Transforming a carpet into a way of living the house. Here is who designs the furniture inspired by uses and behaviors that did not exist until ten years ago

The history of design is also the story of a love not always reciprocated, that between the body and the technique. The first has its reasons which the second often does not understand, even though it is clear under the eyes.

Let's take the case of shoes. "Few of us know that the contour of an undeformed foot must be asymmetrical. It is clearly smaller on the one hand. Let's look at it carefully: the big toe extends two to five centimeters beyond the fifth toe. Not only that, the fingers spread out like a fan. Instead, looking at the shape of the shoe, one would expect the toes to converge on the toe and not towards the heel. It is therefore obvious, even for the most distracted observer, that to conform to the line of a shoe, the big toe should be in place of the third toe, that is, in the center".

This is Bernard Rudofsky's famous reckless one against the footwear industry and designers themselves, first - and the latter accomplices - in the crime of bending the shape of the foot to fictitious shapes and style: "The very idea of a modern shoe does not allow intelligent solutions: it is not made to conform to a human foot, but a wooden shape whose shape is decided by the whims of the 'designer'. While the tailor takes into account the fact that his client does not have the same shoulders and arms, and the optician prescribes different lenses for the right and left eye, we buy shoes of identical size and size for both feet, forgetting - or ignoring - that they don't have the same width or length".

We know how it ended: from the mid-1940s, Rudofsky began designing the famous Bernardo sandals (those worn by Jane Birkin and photographed by Helmut Newton) bringing peace between the body and the industry. But the relationship between these two remains troubled.

It is between a quarrel that good design arrives and baptizes creatures never seen before: armchairs and ottomans that design a new way of sitting, lamps as large as chandeliers to be carried with one hand. Between the fifties and sixties, the great masters designed everything needed by the man of their time, giving the illusion of leaving future generations with a world in which nothing remains to be invented and everything, at most, can only be reinterpreted. It takes digital technology with the pervasiveness of a smartphone that fits in your pocket and never leaves you, to push the latest generation of designers to compete with a new vocabulary of gestures strong.

Vincenzo Castellana, art director of Orografie, and the historian and curator Domitilla Dardi call this new design "amphibious", because it speaks to the now double nature of the human being, half analog and half digital. "Design cannot evade the relationship that contemporary man has with mobile phones" explains Castellana. For this reason, in the first collection of the Catania brand - amphibious city like few others, which slips from volcano al mare - three objects are born precisely to interpret this relationship and the gestures that put it into scene.

Read also: Orografie at 5Vie for FuoriSalone 2021

So, if Francesco Faccin raised a wooden rod for the smartphone and hooked the device to the top with a magnet to hold it still or carry it around during a phone call or a video meeting, Andrea Branciforti dignified the device by giving it a special place in a ceramic centerpiece, while Davide Frattini Frilli he has set it in a glass frame that allows us to look at ourselves while we speak: not out of vanity, but because looking at oneself is also a measure of order and composure, and therefore of respect for those who see and listen to us.

If these objects with the Orografie brand are objects that could not have seen the light only ten years ago, there is an investigation into the gesture that remains in the analogical field but still deepens the relationship between man and home.

It is the one that led Maddalena Selvini to create in an ancient material such as felt - Long neglected by design - a domestic carpet that can transform into a lawn any corner of the house . Feel Felt arises from the observation of the fluid way of experiencing relaxation: "The material is already welcoming in itself, and the padding makes everything more comfortable. The idea came very spontaneously, inspired by those moments when you are lying outdoors and just a backpack or any soft object is enough to lift your back and head a little and feel comfortable". An idea for living space naturally. And that perhaps, for this reason, Rudofsky would have liked it.