Last year Slow Food Italy organised a conference on the topic "slow+design". What was it about and what did you want to achieve?
We started from the premise that Slow Food's philosophy is a transversal one, that can influence and affect many other fields of thought. The experience we gained in recent years on the topic of safeguarding biodiversity and the many global connections we established, have turned Slow Food into a real network.
So we started off by acknowledging that Slow Food's experience - and the work it has done on nutrition and farming - has a lot in common with the world of strategic design. Hence the need to bring together these two knowledge communities: gastronomic sciences and design research. The Slow Food model is therefore a strategic design model.

What do you mean by strategic design?
Our approach to food has always been based on a deeper insight that it is the result of agricultural work and that this work contains various dimensions. Firstly, tradition and a deep-rooted sense of belonging to the land, the farmers' know-how, if you like, along with their working traditions. Secondly, food production implies a connection with our environment. You don't get quality food if you don't have a quality environment.
In tackling these topics, we realised that we can enhance local resources by emphasising the quality of local experiences and by defining a concept of cultural biodiversity.
In this respect we were - if you like - already following a model, a prototype that resembles the work of strategic designers when shaping new visions.

Are you thinking of design as a tool to help express these traditions and local skills, or as something that goes beyond that?
I am actually responding to how the design world, as far as I am concerned, has degenerated in its relation to food over the last few years. Design has interpreted the food phenomenon exclusively in terms of "food design". Often people thought that all you needed to do was to put together an architect or a designer with a famous chef in order to stimulate a creative design-food exchange. Of course this type of "food design" is a very trivialised notion of what we think it should be.
It is, I think, a mistaken and obsolete approach, which is only focused on providing entertainment.
We want to concentrate instead on the idea that food is really also a network. Food is complex. It encompasses a wide range of chemical, health-related, historical and economic aspects.
We believe that we can focus on the idea of food as a network, by collaborating with those who deal with strategic design and can therefore provide new visions and methodological tools to the world of food and nutrition.

So slow design goes beyond food...
Of course it does. I will give you an example.
We recently helped develop a renewable and alternative energy district in Tuscany. The project started from the farming experience and more in particular from a different way of conceiving agriculture, of breeding and production. However, the focus was not just on sustainable agriculture, but on defining a new vision and concept that could guide people on how to design their homes differently and how to conceive of things like energy use and environmental impact in general, in a more sustainable way.
During the project we had to seamlessly connect Slow Food's experience on agriculture, food, sustainability and farming, with broader topics inherent to the sustainable design of a small district. This is an example of these two disciplines coming together.

Why the expression "slow+design"? Why don't you simply call it "slow design"?
Because we believe that we are talking about two experiences, two disciplines. One derives from
Slow Food, with everything that entails, and the other from design. These two approaches have to confront and challenge each other. Otherwise we are just creating another trendy expression.
A lot of websites are already addressing the topic of slow design and initiatives are now getting off the ground. Many are positive, but some are just following the latest trends.
The term ‘slow+design' points to our belief that these two cultural disciplines have to really engage with each other, in order to provide meaningful mutual contributions.

Can you be a bit more specific on what this could mean?
There is a dramatic change in how people consume wine for instance. What just a few years ago seemed to be the only possible approach to appreciate the quality of a wine, is now shifting. Consumers are no longer satisfied with a wine that is good to drink. They want a wine that is good to think of too. And that includes all possible aspects, such as our relationship with the environment and the way in which the wine is produced.
In the future people will want a sustainable product with certain sensorial qualities that express this respect of our environment. This is a controversial idea of course, where we don't strive anymore for the ‘perfect' wine, but where wine gains in quality due to its imperfection.

The design of imperfection
I believe that the issue of imperfection will become very relevant in the near future - both in the design world and in defining the quality of a particular geographic area. Many places in our world have been excessively modified by mankind in order to achieve perfection. But their appeal and strength in the future will stem from the fact that they are and will remain natural.
Another central idea underlying many of the discussions we had within our activities at Slow Food is "limitation control": a quality product, bearing the features of a good, clean and fair product, cannot be infinitely replicable. It has to have a limit, it has to be finite in terms of quantity, geographic origin, cost and environmental impact. I believe this idea is also very significant for the design world.

That makes sense when designing some services or a local area, but how can this approach be applied to product design, technology design and web design?
Well, it is clear that the relationship with a local area and service design have much in common with Slow Food and its experiences at large, but I think that this idea, this methodology can also be applied to design in a broader sense.
When it comes to nutrition our greatest challenge in the future will be to improve the average quality of the day-to-day food products we consume.
The challenge is to raise the quality of basic staples such as pasta, oil, vegetables, bread and so on, and this idea of increasing the quality of the basic elements in our lives is a notion that is also very relevant in thinking about design and production.
The design and use of objects will have to come to terms with the history of craftsmanship, the traceability of raw materials, and the connection between matter and territory. We learned this with food and agriculture, but these ideas are important in the design world too.

Are there initiatives or people who are currently already engaged in the approach that you wish to adopt, or are you still developing this network?
A first network of close cooperation with the design world was kick-started at the conference we held in Milan in October last year. This has meanwhile led to a flexible and strong network of connections, exchanges and relationships on a global scale, involving universities, academics and experts.
Fritjof Capra, a well-known researcher dealing with social networks, has over the last few months started an intellectual collaboration with Slow Food and sees our numerous initiatives as an example of a strategic communications methodology.
We recently launched a project with one hundred small "educational gardens" in schools across the world. This idea is not only designed to help kids develop skills on how to grow natural products, but it is a "network approach" that enables young people and individuals who grow these vegetable gardens to understand the connections between the land, the environment, sustainability, the seasons, the climate and the weather. These are of course very relevant issues in today's world.
Another practical example is the issue of climate change that is currently forcing people who are active in wine production to start harvesting much earlier in many Italian regions.
If these climatic changes continue in the future, wine producers will have to adopt a new agronomic vision enabling local interventions that take these changes into account.
Strategic design and service design could play a major role in confronting a topic like this one.

You often refer to "the sensorial experience" and to "experience design" in your texts. What do you mean by them and in what context do you use these concepts?
Up until a few years ago, when you smelled or tasted a food or wine product, you would do that based a sensorial concept of quality: the product had to be excellent and good to eat.
When you were discussing a particular wine, the topic of conversation would be the quality of what was your glass.
Things are totally different now. The sensorial experience is now more than just the sensorial qualities of the wine itself, but also includes what happens beyond the glass.
Therefore the factors that play a role in evaluating a product, whether it be food or wine, are no longer just aesthetic or sensorial, but also environmental, ethical and social. Hence the idea that a product ought to be "good" - as in good to eat - but also "clean", i.e. the result of a sustainable environment-oriented agriculture, and "fair", which means attentive to ethical and social issues.
This experience coming from the food sector can now be easily applied to other areas such as fashion, the arts and product design.
It is no longer enough for a product to be appealing to the eye and aesthetically rich in emotions. It has to provide some added value, that depends on the material and how it was produced and refined. "Sustainable sensoriality" refers to products that are not only high quality from an aesthetical and sensorial point of view, but also contain these other values.

So you are not just referring to the experience of the product itself but to that of the whole production system.
The value factor or experience factor is certainly a key element in the evaluation of a product. And this value is not just ethical but also strongly pragmatic, because it supports local economies and their craft know-how. We can imagine that these "experiences" can be transferred to larger-scale productions, or even to industry in some cases.

What activities are you involved in to implement the slow+design project and its ideas?
I would identify our experiences within Slow Food itself, and the "Terra Madre" project in particular, as the major testing ground for strengthening our ideas.
"Terra Madre" has been a great example of a design project that involved thousands of food-related micro-communities across the world. It applied the "think locally" but "design globally" vision, by giving prominence to the history, identity and culture of those peoples - each one of them bringing their own prototype, their own micro-project based on their culture, tradition, techniques, expertise and know-how.
Our challenge now is to create a stable network, which creates productive links between all these experiences.
In this respect, design could play a key role in boosting development, in networking, and in linking and exchanging these experiences.
For Turin 2008, Slow Food - in cooperation with the Polytechnic of Turin - wants to give precise and practical input to the concept and design of the upcoming Salone del Gusto trade fair itself.
We would like to apply a sustainable approach to the design and development of the fair, including how it operates on a practical level. We want to have the least possible impact on the city, in terms of its urban infrastructure, its transport, its road network, but also in terms of the pollution and the waste that such an event involving over 150,000 people can produce.
We believe that the small-scale responses that we are currently working on can already provide an immediate sense of what can be done to make such a major fair progressively more sustainable.

Many designers will be involved in Turin 2008 and many more will read this interview on the Turin 2008 website. How can those interested become more engaged? Is there a platform where they can exchange ideas?
Slow Food and the University of Gastronomic Sciences will try to create a shared space for suggestions and ideas. This is still a work in progress, which is normal in a project that grew so spontaneously.
The very idea of design and eco-design is only now making its way into Slow Food. Many of the things we discussed today are not yet shared by the entire organisation, but they are being slowly phased in. I am convinced that, given the attention they have received, it would be worthwhile to give space and continuity to the initial conference of last year and to commit ourselves to create a network that sets out a more scientific and cultural vision of the relation slow+design - as opposed to making these issues an element of entertainment, and thereby trivialising them, as we have seen so often.

Is this an Italian initiative thus far, or are there Slow Food entities in other countries also working on this?
On a recent trip to Japan I had the opportunity to lecture on this topic at a couple of universities and I noticed a great amount of interest.
We are dealing here with an ongoing process. We need a network that enables dialogue and communication, and that can highlight the experiences countries like India and Brazil are developing on this theme.

Are there particular themes that you would like to work on internationally?
I think that it would be very interesting to confront the theme of the "marketplace" with these communities and experts.
In my view, nascent initiatives like those of the "farmers markets" in big cities but also in smaller centres will become increasingly widespread. They will create a new vision of the marketplace which is intimately intertwined with the history and tradition of the market, not just as a commercial and economic entity, but also as a place to meet and to exchange, a place where to build the ‘end-points', the nodes of communication networks.
Therefore the idea of the market, with all its implications on the local economy, city planning, environmental impact and social life, will be high on the slow+design agenda. I am already working with designers and experts to make sure that this will be key in the future.

Doing what exactly?
I am preparing the opening of a hundred markets and market initiatives, in Italy, which - as I mentioned earlier - will be both the setting for commercial transactions and places where producers and consumers can meet.
Through the market consumers become "pro-sumers" or "co-producers" - able to play a productive role in the supply chain. Such a marketplace offers the chance of creating a real network of small-sized producers, thus providing a response to the activities that grew out of the "Terra Madre" food community.
This idea calls for design tools - whether they are strategic, experience or service design.

When will you be launching the initiative?
It is already an active project within Slow Food. Some local areas and regions are already taking on these models. The farmers markets are already widespread in the U.S.A. and the U.K.
In order to strengthen, improve and support the planning of this project, we need to network all these experiences and transfor them into a new visionary model of how to turn a micro-economy into a local economy.

Are there any other design-related projects?
We have a project that has been running for some time now within our presidiums. They are small-scale models of local sustainable economies within a particular geographical area, that aim to safeguard biodiversity and preserve endangered products.
These organisations - about 4 to 5 hundred in Italy - are in fact models of network design. Their strength lies not only in safeguarding a particular tradition, production method, or product or raw material doomed to disappear; but also in the fact that they represent a micro-economic model within a particular geographical context, which is a source of vigour, vitality and energy for the local economy.
There are several hundred success stories - in Italy and across the world - of products that were revitalised through a strategic design-oriented model and are now reshaping the local territory, the tourist sector, the agriculture and the impact on the environment.
All examples, opportunities and insights from the design world will therefore be very helpful in this project.
I'd like to give you another example.

Please go ahead.
Wine-growing isn't only about producing wine, but involves an agronomic intervention on a territory. It outlines it. It acts on it.
The wine-growing model, including the design of the cellars' architecture, will now have to be altered in order to be sustainable. This activity will require the interaction between the design world and the wine-growing sector, but will also involve the wider agricultural stakeholders and Slow Food itself.

In practical terms?
The changes in how we approach food will also lead to dramatic changes in the way we think about the environment, the kitchen, the setting and the context in which food is prepared and consumed.
I am talking about the kitchen environment in apartments and houses. I think, and this may sound provocative, that this particular environment will become a "free zone" in the house, where for instance the idea of cooking won't be all about high technology. It will rather be a room in which one will rediscover objects, materials and tools designed for the ever-more-wholesome food we consume.

A slow cuisine...
Correct. Therefore the very idea of the cooking experience, having a refrigerator, and conserving food will need to be questioned.
This is just an example of how a change in nutrition habits and a greater sensibility for food that is good to eat and good to think of, will genuinely change things.
A sustainable sensorial experience will also require designers to have a deeper knowledge of the subject.
You can't design a kitchen without knowing the materials that will be prepared in it, just like you cannot design a cooking pot without factoring in the raw materials that are going to be cooked in it.
Raw materials will be different in the future and we will have to approach them differently. As you can see, a commitment to a cross-disciplinary, multi-sensorial experience will require a mutual contamination between the two worlds of design and slow food. The technically sophisticated architects are not going to be enough. They too will need to master a broader knowledge base.

Your idea about the slow refrigerator intrigued me. Are you thinking about products that you just keep for a short time?
Of course. I am thinking about how in the old days families used to be so much wiser in their purchasing and consumption habits and in the deeper logic that defined their relationship with food.
Purchases were based on the seasons, your needs, what you could afford, what was available, how long they could be preserved and whether the produce could be found nearby. If all these values will once again become part of the consumer culture, then many objects and spaces in our homes will need to be rethought.

Thank you.