Jesse Marsh

Major at Williams: Studio Art

Even before leaving Williams, I became enamoured of the new Milanese school of Industrial Design, largely due to a big exhibit at the MOMA in 1972 called “Italy: the New Domestic Landscape” (I missed it but devoured the catalogue). It featured a group of architects aimed at interpreting new materials (e.g. plastic) and new technologies (e.g. transistor TVs) in the light of the social and cultural upheaval of the late ‘60s. The Hubbard Hutchinson Fellowship allowed me to travel to Milan upon graduation, where I landed an apprenticeship at the “studio” of one of the featured design teams (Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper), and I ended up working there for seven years before branching off on my own. Below you can see some of my designs for a range of clients, all following that approach.

Towards the end of the 1980s, I began to feel that the local design scene was beginning to lose its original relevance, with new materials and technologies requiring increasing specialization and the social drivers losing steam; design was becoming a merely stylistic exercise with the rise of postmodernism. At the same time, however, computing was just beginning to be unleashed upon the general public; that seemed to me to be the great new design challenge, even if it involved working with the immaterial. I started with an experimental exercise designing the logic flow and screen graphics with a client for whom I had just designed a programmer for pacemakers.

Then I managed to get involved in the world of European-funded collaborative research projects, initially dealing with multimedia and learning technologies and soon branching off to teleworking, smart cities, e-democracy, and a whole range of social and technological innovations all requiring, in my mind, a new vocabulary in a similar fashion as the transistor TVs of the ‘70s.

Over time, these projects developed a common set of methods to engage end users to participate directly in the design of applications and services; this co-design approach was baptised as the Living Lab movement, in which I participated for over 10 years. In a co-creative process, rather than a designer giving form to the object of creativity (be it a chair or an app), non-designers become engaged in a process that elicits their collective creativity: The new role of the designer - or more often a multi-disciplinary creative team - is to configure and mentor that process, whose result is then collectively owned by all. The methods for this continue to evolve, and I am currently focusing on coordinating a network for the collaborative co-creation of new circular business models and value chains for the textile and clothing sector.

Email: jesse@atelier.it

“Nordik” ceiling fan

Client: Vortice elettrodomestici. 1983 (with F. Trabucco and M. Vecchi, “IF” prize at Guteform Hannover, 1984).
Design challenge: At least in Italy, ceiling fans at that time were confined to factory sheds. This design aims to give them a domestic simplicity for use in the home environment.

Sterile packaging blisters for pacemakers and accessories

Client: Sorin Biomedica (Fiat Group), 1984 (selected Bio 11, Ljubljana, 1986; selected XIV Premio Compasso d’Oro, 1987).
Design challenge: Introducing a pacemaker into a surgical operating room requires a two step process to open the sterile packaging blisters. Here the design aims to organise the elements in a simple layout and make it easy to extract the pacemaker, the electrode, and various tools even with surgical gloves on.

PMP-1000 Table programmer for pacemakers

Client: Sorin Biomedica (Fiat Group), 1985 (selected XIV Premio Compasso d’Oro, 1987).
Design challenge: This was one of the earlier devices allowing to program a pacemaker’s operating parameters externally, through a radio connection. The design dates from the period of the “portable” computers that preceded modern laptops and adopts what was then state-of-the-art, a folding screen, with simple lines that aim to recall an open book.

Logical flow and screen graphics for the PMP-1000

Collaborative experiment with Sorin Biomedica, 1987.
Design challenge: When the first prototype of the above design was turned on, I realised that the screen graphics and the logical sequence of the operations were in total contrast with the careful design of the body. In those days, designers didn’t pay attention to software, but I managed to get the client to allow me to design the screen font and the logical sequence and implement the design in the final product.

Elasta chair

Client: Arflex, 1988.
Design challenge: The idea here was to give a normal home chair a flexible seat and back, similar to the ergonomics of office chairs. This was achieved by mounting the two elements in curved plywood onto spring steel supports that in turn are inserted into a steel frame.

Washington executive office furniture

Client: Arflex, 1990.
Design challenge: Executive office furniture normally tries to communicate authoritativeness with a heavy footprint, robust thicknesses, and expansive surfaces. The idea here is to offer a different interpretation, better adapted to emergent styles of leadership in a sophisticated knowledge and innovation economy. The design recalls previous periods with clean Chippendale lines, cabinets reminiscent of 19th century museum collections, and a two part desk with an intimate, personal core unit recalling the 18th century “secretaire” and a sweeping class surface for colleagues and guests.

Electronic Town Meeting

EU project: “PARTERRE: Electronic participation tools for spatial planning”, 2010-12.
Design challenge: This project worked with citizens living in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Palermo, giving them a tool with which to participate in decisions that would then go into the city plan for the area. The project team designed and executed the process through which individual discussions in the groups at the different tables were captured, collected and synthesized into a report reflecting the main stances that emerged. The process took place in real time, allowing the participants to provide further feedback immediately following the discussion and vote on their preferred options.

Networked bacteria dyeing workshop

EU project: “Shemakes: Opportunity ecosystems bridging the gender gap”, 2021-23.
Design challenge: The TCBL network brings together over 50 innovation labs across Europe exploring radical innovations to improve the environmental and social performance of the textile and clothing industry. In the shemakes project, the design team worked with a set of these labs to develop a methodology for networked research, alternating phases of local in-person collaboration in each lab with connected sessions sharing insights and results and updating the overall strategy, in this case exploring the use of lab-grown bacteria to replace chemical dyes for yarns and fabrics.