In 2013, Moak becomes partner of ADI (Association of Industrial Design) for “the attention to design and culturally conscious planning”. We created a display regarding industrial design and how it could affect a company’s success in the market in “the sign moak” precisely for the inseparable connection between industrial design and business, between the product’s functionality and aesthetics. The Design we choose to surround ourselves is expression of ourselves; it is meeting point between vision, technology and creativeness. It creates products able to express themselves, inform about their functions as well as inspire new ones. Abadir is a private Academy that inaugurated a new Design Department in 2010 with the aim to develop new professionalisms, relating the culture of our area with the international one and establishing a dynamic laboratory that can be confronted with a constantly evolving world. Promoted by the director, architect Lucia Giuliano, the idea is to set up a global cultural institution dedicated to education, research and experimentation. Graduated in Palermo, she decides to pursue her studies in Spain and then come back, in order to offer her homeland her extraordinary experience and cultural baggage.
After earning your graduation in Architecture in Palermo, what motivations drove you to pursue your studies in Spain and then, ten years after, come back to Sicily?
After my graduation, I needed to explore the world. Because university gives us many things, but doesn’t teach us everything. I needed to understand how the world would work elsewhere, I needed to acquire new ways of seeing, observing other habits, other languages, other cities, other customs and find out other ways to making projects. So I did my best to apply for a Leonardo scholarship and started my traineeship at the studio of Arata Isozaki y Asociados Espana in Barcelona – the Spanish headquarters of the main office in Tokyo. I started to alternate work and study at the ETSAB (Escuela Politecnica de Arquitectura de Barcelona). Ten intense, basic years to be able to do all the things I am now doing in Sicily. I was able to make my choice today thanks to those ten years: stop being an architect, at least for now, and working on another project, the one of a design school in Sicily.
From 2010, you undertook the role of Director of the Abadir Academy. What main changes did you promote?
Before starting this project, the first question we asked ourselves was: a school has to be useful for what? What is missing in Sicily? The education in design is one of the most important weak points, if we look at the educative panorama of our region; many of our student are compelled to move towards the northern areas, in order to be educated as designers. With this aim, we founded a new design department managed by Vanni Pasca, who decided to sustain our project right away, becoming an important support of our activities (from a didactic and scientific point of view as well as the viewpoint of direct contact with the world of design and business).
How are these changes related to the Sicilian territory?
Design is a key discipline to transform the world around us. I believe it is necessary, if not essential, to have designers that are educated in Sicily, able to imagine changes that are either small or big, but significant. Designers are the right interlocutors for companies that want to grow, increase their products or their way of communicating; for privates, for the public, for museums, for restaurants. Sicily needs designers.
ADI Sicilia sponsored different initiatives and masters. What importance has this cooperation?
ADI is an important nationwide design outpost; the association has been promoting the culture of design and synergies between designers and companies in Italy since the Fifties; therefore, it is an important privilege for Abadir having shared many of its activities with the Sicilian representatives. It is an institutional support of great significance, because it encourages the school.
How can a designer contribute to the growth of a company?
Design is a discipline that transforms. Companies have to adapt themselves to an ever-changing world. They need new visions, new ways of communicating, new products and new methods. To do that, you need two things: visionary businesspersons and designers that help them to turn their vision into reality.
How is it possible to set up and strengthen the relationship between culture and company?
Basic point we aim for is education. The mission we have undertaken is to educate young designers and spread the culture of designing in Sicily. The partnership between school and business is one of the most important elements in our project, because it allows two universes to meet; the one of students – who get to know the working world closely – and the entrepreneurial one – that directly detects the possibility to get in touch with young designers and becomes aware of the fact that they absolutely need them to renew themselves and be in line with the times.
