I Recycle, You Recycle

Melek and Nûr went to Palazzo Isimbardi to try Righe, a new outdoor furniture, and loved it.

We Frogs are old enough to remember times when recycling did not exist, for the simple reason that there was nothing to recycle. Nobody had more than a few objects, all made out of natural materials.

Food was sold in paper bags, and everybody touched it with their hands: vendors and customers alike. There were no electronic devices nor imported cheapo mass produced stuff. A telephone was rooted into a house, it did not walk around with a person. Of course, it was another world.

Recycling poses new challenges to designers and the proof is in the pudding: the exhibition "Io riciclo tu ricicli" (I Recycle you Recycle) runs for its 5th time this year at *FuoriSalone*. Hosted at the Nhow Hotel in via Tortona and at the beautiful Palazzo Isimbardi, both in the center of the city of Milan, "Io riciclo tu ricicli" exhibited a lot of interesting projects born from an ecological concept and the wish to give new life to discarded articles or materials.

*Righe* which in Italian means stripes, lines or rules, is what Frogs loved more: a series of outdoor furniture which, beyond being ergonomic, ecological, and social, is definitely elegant. Designed by Chiara Cerea of Chiara Cerea Studio, Righe is manufactured out of discarded HPL by Verlata, a Co-op who offers assistance to people with various degrees of disability.

We also liked very much "design à porter" by Davide Paganotti, because of its playfulness and also because we are especially fond of cardboard.

We have also seen the "Kigali Chair Project" which explains how a wheelchair can be produced out of a bicycle and a chair, and how it is much more suitable for countries where an expensive modern wheelchair cannot be repaired when any of its high-tech part breaks.

This reminder that exporting high tech objects is not always the solution brought us back to a designer we were very fond of as students of industrial design, and still are: Victor Papanek. His book *Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change* was a philosophical beacon which shaped the ecological and social consciousness of many, and ours among them.

So we have been very very happy to visit "Io riciclo tu ricicli" which was, among the many Fuori Salone exhibitions and events, by far and large the one with which we felt more attuned.

That'All, Folks! See you tomorrow for the last installment of this somehow unplanned Design Story.