You started from the Odyssey and Ulysses, who builds his boat to make the journey of life. Where did the idea for “Zattere” come from?

Francesco Faccin: “I keep within me a series of useful, high intellectual and ethical references, which I then bring to earth in everyday projects. I need inspirations far from my world to think about why we do things, about the origins of creativity, about our need to produce.

I have always been amazed that it is a human peculiarity that makes us so different from other mammals. A crocodile has been the same for 260 thousand years, but we have had the need to build objects that are extensions of ourselves since the beginning".

"Zattere was born from a request from Pietro Corraini for a project that would fit into the current of more Munari-like products, such as the Architecture Box. I suggested making a raft that could be assembled for children. It wasn't a random thought, the raft is a concept that often comes back to my mind. We got to the prototype, only to then realize that we had to abandon everything for banal regulatory reasons.

But something even more important happened: over time, the research surpassed the project, it multiplied in a series of sub-stories, examples, broader reasoning. Corraini pointed this out to me and pushed me to write a book.

I chose to work with Sistemamanifesto, a studio founded by three very smart young people who graduated from PoliDesign (they are Gaia Brambilla, Veronica Camera and Filippo Da Prada) and who are openly focused only on on the research phase, the one that precedes the project. With them we deepened the research, reasoning at length on case studies and on the series of reasonings that inspire them. It was very useful for me to reflect on the fundamental parts of our being designing animals".

The raft is our attitude to explore the world. An object made of waste, in an emergency, which can however be a sign of a beginning, or of continuity. Like the islands of plastic material that transport organic elements from one continent to another, unnatural presences that interact and coexist with the natural world.

During the presentation of Zattere at ADI we talked about it at length: I am tired of hearing that we are the parasites of the planet, because this is a great excuse to block ourselves in fear and immobility.

I try to teach young people to shake off this sense of guilt, because our thousand-year history says that we continue to produce absolute quality and wonder in the midst of so many errors and destruction. And we are equipped with a self-critical capacity that gives me hope. I am not interested in understanding how it will end, what interests me is to continue to produce beauty”.

It is a book that entertains, heartens, amazes and inspires by talking about 10 “rafts” destined to sail the seas, the sky and space. What is the urgency behind it?

Francesco Faccin: “I would like to convey a radical idea, which belongs to us: to look around as if we were castaways, using what is there with courage, inventiveness. I hope that the abstract reasoning of Rafts can then be used in everyday life.

It is about bringing the distance between utopia and practical life closer, trying to make two instances that will never coincide coincide: the ideal and the real. This irrepressible tension is the positive engine of man.

"The other theme is necessity: the raft always speaks of a need to go elsewhere, to escape, to save oneself. Of an inevitable project, of a matter of life or death. And in reality today we talk very little about necessity, as designers.

Instead we need to ask ourselves urgent questions: is what I am doing towards clients, people, companies correct? When do we ever talk about necessity today?

By asking ourselves questions we can only slow down production spontaneously. Because responding to the ethical imperative takes time. I still see a tail of hyperactivity in many colleagues and in much of the industry: personally I prefer to make a living by putting many activities together in order to make few products. My ideology requires me not to enter into contradictory dynamics with respect to a vision I have of the world, not just of my work".

Does talking about design then mean talking about the nature of human beings?

Francesco Faccin: “Writing Zattere was like drawing a line, declaring where I am in my practice and in my life. It is not an abstract exercise, but linked to daily actions, to personal choices.

I hope it is a concrete invitation to start getting your hands dirty again, to have the courage to live in the real world, to sail the land and sea to really understand things, with obstinacy.

While I was working on Zattere with Sistemamanifesto we contacted all the “designers”, the authors of the recounted enterprises, to ask for permission to use their stories and images. One of them was untraceable. He didn’t answer our emails for a year.

One of the guys then set off, physically went to look for him, asked around in bars, talked to people. When he finally found him, he was obviously hostile to the idea of ​​ending up in a book. But the guy convinced him. If he hadn't physically set out on the journey, with courage and stubbornness, we would never have succeeded. It's the same root of the attitude with which Werner Herzog worked on his films, sometimes injuring himself, sometimes risking his life.

Behind this anecdote is the insistent call to exploration. The raft is an object that makes me dream, that reminds me that we live on a wild planet, where you leave and you don't really know if you'll arrive".