Swiss Textile Machinery: May we start with a personal question? You studied industrial product design and focus your career in this field. Why not furniture, or cars or watches…?
Vito Noto: I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of creating a relationship between the aesthetics of a product and the machine that produces it. I’m inspired at craft workshops or by farming equipment, where a kind of harmony exists between ‘things’ and ‘things that make things’. I consider this as fundamental, because it determines that both share a form of lasting life. Therefore I dedicate my work to unite the beauty of products with tools that produce them in modern industrial culture.
Swiss Textile Machinery: The textile industry mainly demands machinery which has both functionality and high performance. What’s the significance of machine design?
Vito Noto: We know that the most technical buyers are influenced by the aesthetics of the things they buy. This is why companies such as Stäubli and Benninger, for example, build a living world around their capital goods, endowing them with unmistakable style and color and expressing to their professional users the language of affiliation and exclusivity.
Swiss Textile Machinery: Is this the only reason why machine manufacturers look for unique designs?
Vito Noto: Design can make a fundamental contribution to communication, differentiation and branding of machinery companies – just as we have all become used to with consumer goods over many years. This idea is based on the approach of design-driven differentiation (DDD). My collaborator is Alessandro Bruni, Adjunct Professor of Strategic Development of Industrial Companies at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Pisa, Italy. He and I coined the philosophy that industrial design must share the same principles as product design: namely function, aesthetics, uniqueness, differentiation, emotionality, and identification. This way, companies develop machines and systems speaking the language of beauty and superiority to their users.
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Swiss Textile Machinery: Design-driven differentiation is all about the marketing of the machines. Correct?
Vito Noto: Not only! To us, the most interesting and exciting aspects of DDD are the technical principles that allow design of horizontal ranges (a set of functions) and vertical ranges (their evolution over time) throughout the life cycle of the machine. We discover with our customers’ designers and engineers how each functional set of machines has its own evolutionary path – like a pattern – and use that to plan and manage ongoing technological evolutions. This may even include an element of ‘disruptive’ development. We go through this process because design and engineering must work closely together, to see functions in the present time, while shaping the future that awaits us.
Swiss Textile Machinery: Where are the limits of industrial design?
Vito Noto: No limits. The more viewpoints are considered, the more the object becomes rooted in its environment and ‘lives’. We can include interfaces, pictograms, colors, decorations, interaction, movements, static elements, dynamic elements, performance, software, operators, safety, materials, etc. In design, we apply these viewpoints across a range from assemblies of very few components to very complex machines. The underlying philosophy is the same: our purpose expresses its soundness in completely different contexts.
Vito Noto is the founder and CEO of Vito Noto Industrial Design, located in Cadro, near Lugano in southern Switzerland. He started as junior designer at Swiss Walserdesign and continued his career at Valuedesign/KEHA in Hamburg and later at Endt Fulton Partner in Paris. In 1982, he started his own business. His work of four decades is exhibited – and with it the increasing significance of industrial design honored – at the m.a.x. museo in Chiasso, Switzerland from May 7 to September 11, 2022. Vito Noto was born in 1955 and is a Swiss citizen by choice. He’s married and the father of two adult children.