This year we’ve tasked our jurors with envisioning the future of product design. Each one of them had their own ideas to share with us and we’ve decided to collect their thoughts in a series of interviews called “Talking to Jurors”. We’ve asked all of them what they’re looking for in an entry and what they’re going to reward. Among all of their predictions and opinions, one stood out – design must be human and provide solutions that meet people’s needs. What is truly unforgettable is the product’s ability to improve the lives of everyone.
Meet the Italian Designer Paola Navone and her passion for a free and visionary creativity.
What are you looking forward to finding in our entries and which features are you going to reward?
I hope to find free and visionary creativities with the desire to take advantage of the opportunities that new technologies provide to product Design. With a special care to sustainability and people’s well-being.
Which role do you think a Design Award should have nowadays?
I think they should promote “good Design” in the contemporary meaning, that is different from the past when all was still to be invented. Today a project is no longer only innovative, pleasant and functional, but it has to deal with sustainability and globalization. It must be comfortable and suitable for different spaces and styles.
In which direction should contemporary product Design go and how should it evolve to answer people’s needs?
I feel that people today are always looking for a tailored home, set up with the objects they like, possibly customized and unique. There is a different attention to the trends of the moment comparing to the past years.This possibility gives a great chance to Designers: they can enjoy the energy of creative freedom, forgetting style uniformity.
Seatings for Serax, Paola Navone
Next 01 for Gervasoni, Paola Navone
Chester Moon for Baxter, Paola Navone
About Paola Navone
Straightforward, a dreamer and eclectic: her mind and soul are a combination of flavors and colors of the South of the world – known, loved and lived – together with the taste and forms of the West, rich in traditions, open and continuously in movement.
All of this produces her untiring curiosity in her research for matters and materials, forms and structures. In her research for the present, the past and the future.
Paola Navone is an Architect. She is a product Designer, Interior Decorator and Art Director and an exhibitions and events curator.
In 1983, she won the prestigious Osaka International Design Award. She was awarded as Designer of the Year in 2000 for the magazine Architektur&Wohnen.
In 2011 won the Elle Deco International Design Awards for two project.
On 2014 she was included in the Interior Design Magazine’s prestigious Hall of Fame.
On 2018 she won the Elle Deco International Design Awards in the outdoor furniture category.
She has worked and still collaborates with some among the most important brands in the international and Italian stage of the design world.