The Book - April 2025
A response to Michael Anastassiades's interview on collectible design, published in The Book - Contract Network, April issue dedicated to Milano Design Week 2025.
This article was not pitched. It was requested. In March 2025, Contract Network publishes an interview with Michael Anastassiades in which the Cypriot designer dismisses collectible as "a story about money", "a comfort zone" for those eager to "cross the finish line too early". A partial reading, one that called for a different perspective.
The interview with Paolo Casicci, published in the following issue, takes up the provocation and inverts it. The intention is to reframe the discourse: the true comfort zone for designers today resides in the mechanism that compels companies to turn to the same established names, rather than in pure, often radical, experimental research. "Today the design system is oligarchic. A few prominent names serve as art directors for ten, fifteen companies. This system renders the powerful more powerful and the emerging invisible."
The projects featured in the article are the first three editions of WE DON'T DESIGN, the collectible design identity through which Francesco Meneghello pursues a research practice parallel to his interior design studio: Mirrorless, Memorie, Aldilà. Mirrors that yield no reflection, rugs that refuse to decorate, crystal spheres encasing scents impossible to perceive. Objects that exist to interrogate what "functioning" truly means.
