Luca Nichetto

Multitude by method is the Nichetto Studio motto. Would you care to elaborate?
I believe that design is a multitude of things. There are no limits; almost. It is a way of thinking, it is somehow a problem-solving process, and in order to do that, you need a method. Creativity is not something that has to be messy—it can be—but it also needs to follow a method, to achieve a goal. You need to know who is in front of you, what their needs are and what you will solve by providing the product that you are going to create for them. So, multitude by method is a slogan to describe what we do every day: so many projects for many different clients all around the world.

When you design you use touch and vision, of course, but do the rest of your senses come to assist you?
Absolutely. Design is everything. It’s your childhood, your past, your memories, your experiences. It can be a smell that helps you get a memory, reading a book or watching a movie. A sound that sends you right back to a certain piazza and brings a mental image. Also, sometimes it’s like objects emit an energy.

Name a piece of design that is like poetry in your mind.
There is an object completely outside the design context, which, to me, is the most beautiful object ever, honestly: Tutankhamun’s mask. I was and still am completely in love with that object. When I was a kid, I was fascinated with history: Egypt, Greece and the Romans. When you have layers of things, of history around you growing up, you are bound to be interested in the past. I was fascinated as a child with that mask and still am. I can put my finger on it and say everything comes from here, from my love for that mask.

In 2006, he founded a multidisciplinary design studio in the old harbour of Venice, a post-industrial area called Porto Marghera. But as of 2011 Luca Nichetto’s …playground is in Stockholm, where he lives and runs his second studio. It was there that Nomas found and interviewed him on a snowy day in the Swedish capital, while the Greek one was bathing in the sun. (NOMAS, Venice, p. 42)