From automotive design to pasta design
Do you know what the following cars have in common? BMW M1, Maseratti Quattroporte, Saab 9000, Ford Mustang (2006) and Delorean. If you still do not know, they were all designed by the same person, the legendary Italian car designer, Giorgetto Giugiario. In fact, in 1999 he was named the 20th century car designer. You may not be a fan of cars, but something you are probably fan of, is food, pasta to be specific.
The world of pasta in Italy in the 80's was very competitive. The only thing that differentiated the brands from others, were the prices, almost all had the same quality. It was then when the brand Voiello had the great idea of launching a pasta like no other. To do that, they hired Giugiario to do the job. You may wonder, what does pasta have to do with a car designer? Actually, they are not so different. Like the cars, the pasta is an exercise in structure, each pasta we know is designed to be accompanied by a specific sauce, in order to have the perfect combination of flavor and texture.
The pasta that the brand would launch would have to have the following characteristics: it should not absorb so much sauce, it should increase its volume with water, it should be half as dense as spaghetti, it should be aesthetic, finally, it should be pleasant in flavor. In the end, Giugiario proposed 12 designs of which only one was sent to production: Marille.
Another similar case is Phillipe Starck, legendary industrial designer. This time, 4 years after Giugiario, the Panzani brand commissioned Starck to design its new innovative pasta. The design process is just as interesting as the Giugiaro’s pasta. To explain the process I rather leave you with Starck’s words on a Harvard conference.
OK, what can I do with pasta? Why do we love pasta? When do we love pasta? We love pasta when we are children, when we are sick, when we are stoned — ah! — or when we are old — in other words, when we are a bit regressed. But sometimes when you eat pasta you become fat. Perhaps the thing I can do is to give the same pleasure, with a good mouth full of pasta, but without making people fat. How I can make a pasta that will be ten percent pasta and ninety percent air? If you make a tube, you have ninety percent air, but when it’s cooked, it collapses.That’s why I thought of a spring that makes the pasta stay open. And because American and French people always overcook pasta, I made two wings that have a double thickness, so that when you overcook it, eighty percent of the pasta is still al dente. I asked a doctor, “What is in pasta?” and he said, “It’s a perfectly well-balanced food.” “Well-balanced: yin-yang! Perfect, that can be the spring!”
In the end, the two pastas failed in the market, people did not know how to cook them, the design did not let them cook evenly and they simply were not what the public expected. But even so, it is interesting how two designers that had nothing to do with pasta took their approaches.
