Journeys through space and time

In 2005 a young French designer put himself fairly and squarely on the map – not by incremental steps along a prescribed path, but by brazen initiative. His name is Ito Morabito which he changed to Ora-Ito and the rest is history. His website is here.

He designed watches for Swatch, bottles for Heineken, showrooms for Renault, handbags for Louis Vuitton and a host of others – the thing was none of these products had been made and he’d not been asked to design them – he simply created products that he thought were great and appropriate for the various brands and released them all virtually.

Soon enough these virtual designs became real designs – the aluminum Heineken bottle that now exists is his, the Toyota flagship show-room on the Champs Elysées, his…..the Ora-Ito studio had become in it’s first year, a multi-million dollar business.

An awesome story – the methods of delivery have changed – well maybe not changed per se, the ability to deliver or create “noise”, to get your idea’s across has changed – the gatekeepers are still there – but we have the abilty to circumvent them to some extent these days.  It’s an interesting time in the sense that often we seem to be straddling the old ways and the new ways – not quite committed to either just yet. Big shifts are slow.

Right now I’ve been working forever on the Somnus-Neu design, a fully interactive bed – it’s gaining traction -  Yotel are now talking to me about installing Somnus-Neu in all their new suites in London and NY which is fantastic – they’re innovators in the hotel sector for sure. The point is,  it’s like Ora-Ito did – you have to get the power of the people behind new concepts and they become the barometers in some sense when your trying to get a new concept across the board. Sleeper magazine ran a great feature article on Somnus-Neu which in turn got in front of Yotel who, in turn got in touch with me – you can read the article here.

All roads lead to Rome – it’s up to you which road you choose.