Designer, Maurizio Di Marzio Talking About “ddplus Design & Pet” And The Philosophy Behind This New Italian Brand.

Milan, March 2017

The idea for DDplus came about in 2012. Industry had pretty much come to a halt with the recession and we felt it was time to go back to those values that really make a design project what it is; with Man at its centre, rather than the neurotic needs of an industrial system that had gone haywire. So it was no longer about man as a passive bystander, an unsuspecting customer with little clue as to what the goods and services being thrown at him were about, but Man as the driving force, using objective criticism, autonomous and capable of making up his own mind.

Having said that, this new project has been developed with "industry standards" in mind, making it a product that’s suitable for mass production, both from a technical point of view and an economic one. Of course, this is just to give you a rough picture, but the main point to get across is that behind any industrial product, there are variables that tend to crop up in the planning stage that the consumer will never actually see. I'm a firm believer that, over time, the extremism of industry standards, has devalued what the concept of the design really should be about, at its roots. What we end up with are things that look pretty vulgar and often times, lousy imitations of products sold under the guise of "minimal design" or even worse, "Minimalist design". And this is what made us want to turn the clock back, to bring back those virtues which, over the years, put design in the limelight and made it a witness to how we live and go about sharing our environment. Furnishing accessories are by definition the ideal training ground when it comes to designing everyday objects, and for this reason, DDplus decided to go down that route, but adding an important market segment in pet care. In recent years the number of homes with dogs and cats has rocketed. And the really interesting thing here is just how emotionally dependent we have become on our pets; they’re seen as being part and parcel of the family. So it gave us the idea of putting together a series of beds and bowls using design criteria, aimed at interpreting them, not just as simple functional objects, but as real furnishing accessories, objects that make a visual statement wherever they are placed. This is design philosophy aimed at innovation in the actual form of an object and its visual statement, leaving enough space for streamlining and standardising, without encroaching on what the product is actually saying. So you have accessories which add character to spaces and environments, in a way that's original, simple, never boring and, in any case, miles years away from that "facsimile design" that you often find in Asian products, or those Holding of furnishing sector that have “the obligatory missing screw" when it comes to finishing the Coliseum.

A detailed overview of the products DDplus Design & pet, can be seen on our site www.ddplus-shop.it

More info: ddplus-shop.it