Industrial design studio · Turin
A maker of decorative plumbing fittings was also building ceramic cartridges for mixers better than its own brand suggested. But that quality could not be seen.
I designed a mixer with a ball control, sized by the ergonomics of hand-gripped controls and shaped the way the car industry had already made familiar, so that the smoothness of the cartridge could be felt. The quality became obvious on the first gesture.
Where the idea comes from is half the work.
The other half is being able to prove it is the right one.
Specialities
From a superyacht refit to a single deck fitting. The scale changes, the problem doesn't: on board, every part has to survive salt, movement, and hands that are wet.
See the work →Form doesn't come after the solution: it is part of it. Technology, ergonomics and interaction pull in different directions; the project is the synthesis that holds them together.
See the work →Few centimetres and hard engineering constraints. But moving is never only displacement: it is arriving — with the freedom of doing it alone, or the efficiency of doing it together.
See the work →Method
Designers speak in shapes and drawings. A client — or the board of a group, often the same person — decides on consequences, acceptance, cost and time to market. “It looks good, I like it” is not a decision.
The preliminary conversations, where requests are collected and needs are investigated. The most delicate phase: understanding the project from the point of view of everyone involved — the client, the end user, and also whoever will handle production, transport, promotion and sales.
Everything those conversations produce is gathered and processed, and comes back as the criteria the project will be judged on. Agreed before drawing starts, in the language of the people who have to approve the result — not in the language of design.
The same parameters follow the project through every phase and keep a record of it. Assessments stay objective rather than personal, revision cycles get shorter, and whoever has to sign knows what they are signing.
Datum — the proprietary application I developed in-house, based on AI, that runs this process. Built for defining project briefs and for keeping the evaluation consistent from the first meeting to production.
Selected work
Every project borrows from another — and technology enters only when it solves something.
The door that closes the tender garage folds down onto the swim platform and becomes the aft seating. Reshaping it freed enough volume inside for a larger tender — and the construction technology chosen took weight off the boat.
210 kg less weight, and a larger tender in the same garage
Interior refit proposal for a private owner, 30 m yacht. Light panels set into the ceiling take their shape from the volumes below: one wide, even luminous surface that falls softly across the saloon, closer to a skylight than to a lamp.
The dining area is divided by a fully transparent temperature-controlled wine cellar, whose base holds a large screen that appears on command.
Design proposal — concept study.
Lemania Energy · Start Booster. Thirty years in production is the one proof of design quality that cannot be argued with.
30 years in the catalogue, since 1996
Metro train exterior, in service in Rome. A vehicle everyone uses, every day, has to be understood without instructions: where to board, where to hold on, where it ends. The form does the explaining — and the solidity it communicates is what lets a passenger step on without thinking about it.
Directed as Design Director from product concept through to the final optimisation phases before production.
Red Dot 2018 Honourable Mention — the first Chinese car to receive international recognition for its design
Approach
I start from the problem, and the answer often comes from mixing experience and technology already proven in other sectors. The industry changes; the structure of the problem rarely does.
Before drawing, we agree on the parameters the project will be judged on. It means fewer revision cycles, and criteria that still hold when somebody joins the meeting who has not followed the project.
An idea is worth something if it can be built at the right cost and on the promised date. The rest is styling.
Production sits inside the drawing from the first sketch — tooling, tolerances, assembly, cost, service life. A new technology is worth adopting the day before it becomes necessary, not when it becomes fashionable.
From brief to resolved design intent.
Industrialisation, tooling, assembly.
Teams, suppliers, model shops.
Product families and positioning.
Studio
Twelve years leading design at Changan Motors’ European Design Centre as Design Director and Vice General Manager — up to 80 people across design, engineering, model shop and studio engineering, and the first non-Chinese executive in the company’s top management.
Before and alongside: product and transportation design for Alfa Romeo, Subaru, Proton, Momo, Ansaldo Breda, Eurorama, Lemania Energy, Seitron and Sector, in Italy, Switzerland, Germany and China.
Stefano Carminati
Thirty years of projects taken into production.
The first, from 1996, is still in the catalogue.
Contact
Write or call. A line about what you are making, the constraints you already know about, and when it has to be on the market is enough to start.