Nucleo
Torino, Italy

Five years old, a large number of projects, lots of collaborators, irony, visual art iconographic research, new materials, culture mix, technology transfert: all these concepts represent Nucleo's "contaminated" philosophy. But what's behind Nucleo's brand name? It's not so easy to give a short answer.
Nucleo is a team of designers with different origins and cultures in constant evolution. Their only reference and meeting point is their studio in Turin, or, as they prefer to call it, their "Design Agency". When you join Nucleo, you learn two things - says Piergiorgio Robino, the team's spokesman and leader - hard work and the desire to selflessly share your experience with others. This is the main idea behind Nucleo's large variety of projects - always new, always different, without any cliché, but with a clear aim in mind: designing better and designing for everyone. Experimenting with a certain risk, carefully following Design and its forms of expression but without embracing the classical minimalist or fun design trends. Easy to understand but without being obvious, you can recognise Nucleo more for their differences than for their likenesses.
This way of thinking was behind Terra! (the grass armchair), Angelica (the modern ironically-revisited 18th century chandelier), PluriGigaBalls (the body mattress or curtain), Kitchen ( the first outdoor kitchen sink with equipped wall) and many more. These are only four of the nine projects on display as working prototypes at the 2000 Edition of Salone Satellite in Milan (www.nucleo.to). Some of them have already gone into production thanks to Nforniture (www.nforniture.com) the gutsy international Turin design store.

In the last years we are assisting deep changes in the way to managing and developing an industrial enterprise. The company in order to grow and to contrast the saturation of the western market must assume a total and flexible dimension. On the wake of the fast progress "the new industrial design" can not be a passive element but it must play an active part of the industrial and strategic process. It must foresee any transformations with a wide designing vision. The creative entrepreneurial model able to conceive strategies through innovative visions is not confined anymore to specific fields and design oriented sectors as the fashion sectors is. The today's consumers are more self-conscious and cultivated and rather than products and solutions they prefer stories transforming the utility into emotion.