Follow along as our team travels through Lacoste, France, and Milan, Italy, while developing project proposals for @ducati and @kartellpeople. During this time, we documented our experiences and conducted interviews to capture our teams personal insights.
This conversation touches on key themes such as sustainability, the future of women in the design industry, and the structure behind our project proposals.
All right, good to go. Take away. Greetings from Scadost. Today we are discussing a current collaboration effort between Ducati Cartel and Savannah College of Art and Design. Our team is comprised of about 20 interdisciplinary students from all over the world. My name is Lucas Journey and this is my team. I’m Sophia Dennison. I’m a junior industrial design student. Hey, I’m Coleman Chin, um, industrial designer, primarily focusing on like the luxury side of things. Hi, I’m Isabella Kang. I come from a fine arts background as a painter and a sculptor. So, can you explain the collaborative effort that Savannah College of Art and Design is doing with Ducati and Cartel? Yeah. So generally SCAD sticks to a brief but in this case I think that their whole idea is that there isn’t a brief. Um we’re teaching students how to be problem setters instead of problem solvers is essentially the thing. So if I was to describe it I would say that the students are setting their own brief. We’re doing our own thing and finding our own problems to solve. Who is Ducati and Cartel? Well I guess I’ll start with Ducatti. Ducati is an Italian motorcycle company um and they specialize in sports bikes mainly and um they’re known for their really really fast bikes. Yeah. And Cartel is another Italian brand more in the design manufacturing really famous for like their use of plastics but kind of at an elevated level. So kind of changing that narrative that plastics are cheap. We’re kind of acting as freelance designers in this kind of setting and so we could choose to do a project for Cartel, for Ducati, for a collaboration between those brands. It’s very open. Once we have our idea, uh, we can pitch it and see how it goes. So last week, our team went to Milan and we got to meet with the head of Ducati where he gave us a breakdown, a brief of our future projects and we also got to tour the cartel facilities. Can you guys tell me what you learned from this trip? Yeah. Um I’m going to start off with Ducati because it was just Oh, it was so interesting to me. Um, I have a few points actually that I really marinated on and a lot of it was that going into Ducati, it looks like a very like perfectionist brand, but at the heart of it, it’s like a family. One thing that the lead of the designers said to us was that sketches are just sketches. They don’t have to be perfect. They just have to communicate. And I thought that that was something that was really interesting. They like really value flexibility. They find it as a strength. If they find a detail at the very end of the process, they’ll redo the whole thing to fix it if they don’t like it. They have this quote, the designer that we met, they have a certain shame for designs that are not made out of love. That was so powerful to me. So, they’re just full of designers that are truly dedicated and they design from their heart. Jumping off, I think it’s really interesting. Our professor Paulo uh is always talking about the story behind each product and he is a firm believer that form doesn’t follow function but form follows metaphor and most of cartel’s designs are all metaphors simileies like they’re they’re comparing two unlike objects to create a story. Yeah. I mean story is everything. Story is what makes us buy products. Every product has a personality, right? And you want to feel connected to the things that you own and the things that you wear, things that you drive. And so, um, and so, yeah, those stories are what are what builds that connection. So, our generation has a large push for sustainability and one of the main culprits of that is plastics. Uh, do you think that cartel is is aiding or creating a new frontier with plastics? Is there space for them in the modern market? Yeah, I would love to speak on this because uh my first impression of cartel was kind of negative in that way because obviously plastics is a huge um problem especially in America. But upon doing further research, cartel really I mean historically has continued to redefine plastics and what their perception is to the public. And so they first started out making plastic furniture and that was the first time anyone had ever done that before. So they really redefined the home space to include plastics like plastics in the kitchen and in the living room. That had never been seen before. And then now like obviously plastic furniture is very popular everywhere. A lot of brands do it. But but now there’s a perception of plastic being really cheap or not wellade or will break easily or it’s very unsustainable. And so Cartel has really taken it under their wing to continue to keep redefining that perception. And so they’ve been working towards doing all sustainable plastics. So they’re using new bioplastic technology that they’re developing in house. They’re also collaborating with different brands. I know that they just did this chair that’s made out of recycled like K cups. So they’re using recycled plastics. are also experimenting with new types of wood kind of blends of m materials. So they at their core they are really a material science and a manufacturing just innovation company which is very exciting. Has working with these companies changed the way that you view the relationship between traditional design and innovative design being that Ducati is a company that’s rooted in a traditional heritage of racing and cartel is on the contemporary cusp of design. Yeah, for sure. It it’s definitely an interesting like combination of brands and identities coming together here, but I also think that’s like what makes the project interesting is that it’s kind of an unorthodox kind of marriage of like two very like historic Italian brands. And so I think honestly a lot of our work to start was just like getting to know the brands like really trying to understand what Ducati is about going to their factory seeing what they’re about talking to their head designers and then obviously going to cartel and talking to their people and just really trying to get a sense of that and yeah going to Ducati. I mean, I think Ducati presents themselves as a pretty masculine focused brand, and it’s not necessarily their fault. I think just motorcycle culture in general is kind of intimidating to step into as a woman, just because historically it hasn’t really been for us. But it was so exciting. We stepped into that factory and it was all people like me. And that was just amazing. And it just, you know, um it caused me to have a lot more respect for the brand and it caused me to have a lot more excitement to work with them knowing that, you know, like they might have like these traditional values like they’re so like rooted in, you know, like where they came from and their heritage, but they’re, you know, like they’re still like very forward thinking and inclusive brand. So, do you guys have a message for young female designers? Okay, I will say and not to rag on anyone, but there’s a lot of people that will try to bring you down as a young woman in the field. And I say instead of taking that and making it something that brings you down, turn around and say, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I can’t say that word on tape, but f you. I’m going to do what I’m going to do, and you’re going to watch me succeed.” Totally. I think um to go off of that, I think that just your perspective is really important and I think it’s an asset to bring your perspective to a male design team and I think that you can use that as something that’s going for you instead of against you. Sure. Thank you guys for your time tonight. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I could be like, why were we struggling? Okay. Oh god, that was funny.