Franco Clivio

Franco Clivio

Product designer and teacher, Zürich

After com­plet­ing his stud­ies at the Hochschule in Ulm in the 1960s, Franco Clivio went on to de­sign prod­ucts for firms such as Gar­dena (gar­den prod­ucts), Erco (lamps) and Lamy (sta­tionery). He col­lects anony­mously de­signed ob­jects in order to demon­strate ′a dif­fer­ent kind of see­ing′. These are prod­ucts that show a star­tling de­gree of func­tion­al­ity, in­tel­li­gence, good use of ma­te­ri­als and qual­ity. This col­lec­tion is con­tin­u­ally added to and has proved in­valu­able over the more than 20 years dur­ing which Franco Clivio has lec­tured at the Hochschule für Gestal­tung Zürich. His method of trans­mit­ting knowl­edge is unique. He tire­lessly en­cour­ages stu­dents under the motto: ′mo­ti­vate, un­der­stand, see′, al­ways with an eye to prac­ti­cal ap­pli­ca­tion. He has su­per­vised the de­vel­op­ment of sev­eral in­takes of no­table de­sign­ers.
The Swiss Con­fed­er­a­tion is ho­n­our­ing Franco Clivio for his sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to Swiss de­sign and for his ac­tiv­i­ties as a de­signer and ed­u­ca­tor.