“Enriching Sustainability”

Disposable containers are everywhere in today's society. We use them to store food and soaps, keep our drinks cool, warm up our lunch. Unfortunately, the efforts we were making against single-use plastics were stalled by the Covid-19 pandemic as the global health emergency increased the use of these materials for hygienic reasons, even though washing reusable containers proved to be much safer than relying on disposable ones. Today more than ever, we need to rethink the behaviour of companies and consumers so that we don’t throw away the progress we have made so far.

Through the projects created for Alessi by students of the Master's course in Product & Furniture Design under the artistic direction of Studio Nendo, the exhibition promotes reuse before recycling. These products allow customers to purchase their items and take them home, where they become part of the domestic landscape. The students gave redesigned the products, conceived not only as functional but also as narrative tools, in line with the Alessi identity. The assumption is that a thoughtful and reasonable reuse practice needs be supported by a strong narrative content to spread and have a significant impact on society.

The exhibition unfolds like a journey that crosses seven different visions, as many as the students involved in the project, who were inspired by different themes that led them to address various issues, with the shared intention of creating products capable of connecting indoor and outdoor dimensions. The result is a series of hybrid objects that create new scenarios and behaviors, to reconsider consumer goods, often abused, and give them new value by rethinking the way users buy and store. As a result, these products have a dual purpose, as carriers and as containers, introducing not only new categories of objects, but also new rituals and daily routines. The aim is to help society transition towards a near future, in which an advanced, lower-impact distribution system will make it possible to deliver consumer goods without using disposable packaging.