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Martino d’Esposito

Awarded

Martino d’Esposito

Various products

Product and Industrial Design

Jury report

Shaped humour
Small ideas make all the dif­fer­ence, as we can see from Mar­tino d'Es­pos­ito's four house­hold ac­ces­sories: clock, cheese grater, lamp and shelv­ing. The Lau­sanne de­signer has im­posed form on a hu­mor­ous idea for each item, thus giv­ing these every­day ob­jects a cer­tain some­thing. For the 'Es­pace Temps' clock he has ban­ished the minute- and hour-hands to sep­a­rate faces. The two faces can be hung up in­di­vid­u­ally, and show a new way of read­ing time, which is read­ily un­der­stand­able de­spite the di­vi­sion. So that there is no con­fu­sion be­tween the hour- and minute-hands, one face con­tains the fig­ures 1 to 12 and the other moves from 5 to 60 in fives. This clock is the most re­cent ob­ject that Mar­tino d'Es­pos­ito has de­signed for the French fur­ni­ture man­u­fac­turer 'Ligne Roset', but the cheese grater, lamp and shelv­ing are pro­to­types, and be­long to­gether as a col­lec­tion of 'Func­tional Sym­bols'. The 'Cheesy' grater con­sists of a grat­ing iron that cuts shav­ings in var­i­ous sizes, ac­cord­ing to the de­signer in order to vary tex­ture and sen­sa­tions, and to be pleas­ing to the eye. The tri­an­gu­lar shape is achieved with bev­elled sheet metal and can be stood up, laid flat or held in the hand. The 'Cruci-Fix' shelv­ing is a hy­brid. The de­vo­tional item takes on an ad­di­tional func­tion as a sup­port for shelves – in the same way as an angle bracket. With a twin­kle in his eye, Mar­tino d'Es­pos­ito tries to give a boost to a re­li­gious ob­ject, so that it ap­pears a lit­tle more fre­quently in our homes again. The last ob­ject in the col­lec­tion is the 'D-Tour' lamp. The rod con­nec­tion be­tween foot and shade makes a lit­tle de­tour halfway up to em­pha­size the switch and to leave more room for get­ting at it and using it eas­ily. D'Es­pos­ito's four items show that ob­jects do not have to be rein­vented to get some­thing more out of them, but that small, witty in­ter­ven­tions can shift fa­mil­iar things into a new light.
Ar­i­ana Pradal

Biography

Martino d'Esposito
Born in
1976
Education
designer HES en design industriel
Group name
d'Esposito & Gaillard

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