Francesco Franchi is a Milan-based designer whose work we first picked up through a link to some of his recent work. I was most impressed by the shots of thesis, called Il Re Designer, which is generously exhibited all over his site.

A word about Italian University: here, a lot of work is put into the ceremonial presentation of theses. Graduation is a very big, formal deal (check out this excellent post on how far this tradition goes back). As a result, even the measliest little print shop stuck in the back of an alley and cluelessly selling DVD-Rs for 5 euros each, will bind your thesis in full, glorious hardcover style. They’ll even take your messy, unorganized word .doc and sort it all out for you, too.

This means when you’re doing a masters at a big-time Milanese University, and this masters is in communication design, and you fancy yourself an Italian designer–you had better make that thesis damn beautiful.

The title is a play on words: “il redesigner” means simply “the redesigner”, but when you separate the word “re”, as he’s done, it becomes “the king designer”. Something like “the designer as king” makes more sense in English, which fits in with his argument that the design of a newspaper is fundamental to its meaning, and should be integrated into the publishing philosophy as an crucial part, rather than simply compartmentalized as the aesthetic presentation of content.

Beyond academia, Franchi has also co-designed the layout for the less-business-y insert to Milano’s big time business paper, Il Sole 24 Ore. It plays with the beginning article from the newspaper’s title (it just means ‘the’), creating an acronym for Intelligence in Lifestyle. I don’t tend to give much time to business papers here in Italy, but maybe I’ll start picking this one up on Fridays and see just what Intelligence in Lifestyle actually means.

The Design Museum of London is launching a new exhibition in a few days. It’s called Design Cities, and it takes a unique approach to exhibiting a period of design: it focuses on the history of several moments and their associated cities. Far from just showing what group of designers happened to come from which place, the exhibit will “investiage the tangible link between design and the city and will celebrate the key achievements of this relationship.”

The exhibition will feature a full range of objects from textiles and fashion to industrial pieces, furniture and prints. It will include design classics such as chairs by Charles and Ray Eames, as well as work by a spectrum of designers that together will evoke an impression of their era. Key exhibits will include work by William Morris, Owen Jones, Christopher Dresser, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray, Achille Castiglioni, Ettore Sottsass, Gio Ponti, Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, Paul Smith, Ron Arad, Zaha Hadid and Ross Lovegrove.

I think it’s useful to look back to a period when cities did draw certain types of designers, when certain sets of studios worked together, or in a common environment, and created something entirely of the time and place–not only because some of those design results were both spectacular and particular, but also because that kind of metropolitan-based cohesion is something largely impossible these days.

The exhibition starts by going back to London in 1851, at the time of the Great Exhibition, the embodiment of high tech, and prefabrication that was both admired, and abhorred in its time. It ends with the London of today, a city that is once again a global centre for design of all kinds. Between the two, the exhibition focuses on six cities, Vienna, just before World War One, when the language of modernity first started to take shape, then Dessau, the small town in Germany that built the Bauhaus, the most famous school of design the world has ever seen. Paris in the 1930s was the city that became the capital of visual culture, where both Picasso and Le Corbusier made their homes.

Today’s inability to find this kind of cohesion isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the way it is. I’m not saying modern cities have lost all their character, far from it–just that the specific aesthetic coming from a city tends to shelter itself under the globalised design world, especially when approached from an online perspective. When I see a chair, a website, a product, anything–one of the last things I associate it with is a city or a specific place.

Sure, you might spot a cultural signpost embedded somewhere in the design (the kind of things that make you say “oh, that looks vaguely Japanese” without really being able to explain much past that), but the give and take of a network society makes it virtually impossible for me to see a product and say “oh yeah, Italian-made all the way.”

The exhibition continues into the post war years and Los Angeles, where Charles Eames built his supremely elegant studio and house was the epitome of the American century. In the 1960s, leadership in contemporary design moved to Milan. And in the 1980s Tokyo made its presence felt, moving beyond the moral certainty of European industrial design, toward a more playful approach. Finally, returning to present day London which is once again the world’s leading centre for design, the base for Ron Arad and Ross Lovegrove, Jasper Morrison and many other leading contemporary designers.

That’s why I’m intensely interested to see the last, ultra-contemporary part of this exhibition, which returns its focus to London: many of the leading contemporary designers are based there at the moment, but is there any kind of specific “London” style of the moment? I doubt it.

London is often recognized as the most cosmopolitan of the world’s cities, and it’s this interconectedness that draws the design world’s leading lights there–the city has more contemporary art installations, innovative designers, and advertising agencies than anywhere (I could write the same sentence about New York, too), but the heyday of “British” design as any kind of relevant force outside of the retro world is largely irrelevant. Thus the return to London as the final destination of the museum’s grand tour leaves me curious to see if today’s “London Style” has anything, really, to do with London at all.

The exhibition runs until January 14th, 2009.

64 designers, 109 works, 7 brand names, 12 products
•     London; Christopher Dresser, Owen Jones, Willam Morris, Joseph Paxton (1851)

•     Vienna; Joseph Hoffmann, Adolf Loos, Koloman Moser, Michael Thonet, Janke Urban, Otto Wagner (1908)

•     Dessau; Marcel Breuer, Lena Mayer-Bregner, Wilhelm Wagenfeld (1928)

•     Paris; Le Corbusier, Jeanneret Pierre, Charlotte Perriand, Eileen Gray, René Herbst, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Jean Prouvé, Citroen  (1931)

•     Los Angeles; Saul Bass, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames, Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi, Elliot Noyes, Eero Saarinen, Ford (1949)

•     Milano; Corradino D’Ascanio, Mario Bellini, Achille Castiglioni, Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Joe Colombo, Perry King, Paolo Lomazzi, Vico Magistretti, Angelo Mangiarotti, Bruno Munari, Marcello Nizzoli, Gionatan De Pas, Giovanni Pintori, Gio Ponti, Richard Sapper, Carla Scolari, Ettore Sottsass, Marco Zanuso, Donato d’Urbino (1957)

•     Tokyo; Nigel Coates, Shiro Kuramata, Canon, Olympus, Sharp, Sony (1987)

•     Londra; Ron Arad, Barber Osberby, Hussein Chalayan, David Chipperfield, Tom Dixon, Fernando Guiterrez, Zaha Hadid, Industrial Facility, Ross  Lovegrove, Jasper Morrison, Ross Phillips, Peter Saville, Paul Barnes, Smith, Paul Smith, Mini (2008)

In Italy they’re called by the more elegant and somehow far cuter name Motorino. A cornerstone of mediterranean culture, especially in urban centres, motorini are still the simplest and easiest way to navigate a city. The various iterations of Piaggio’s famous Vespa from the 1950s onwards are indisputable vehicle design classics, and even after days and days in the south of Italy I still found myself staring like a man transfixed when an old white vespa whizzed past me.

There’s something about the simplicity of a motorino that’s irresistible: it’s a culture entirely different from that of the motocicletta or motorcycle, which involves shifting gears and straddling the bike like a horse; on a motorino you sit like you’re having dinner, with only a simplified spedometer and a couple of lights on your display. People from 14 to 85 drive them here, and hopping on a scooter is about as natural as going for a walk.

A couple of years ago, Piaggio introduced a new line of their famous Vespa scooters that, while not exactly re-creating the perfect heavy lines of the old Vespa frontpiece (for those you need the just-cancelled Vespa PX), comes pretty close. It’s a happily backwards-looking design similar to Fiat new’s cinquecento, the closest a lot of people will get to ever owning one of Fiat’s old masterpieces of a car.

Vespa Canada (yeah, we do drive some vespas in Canada, even if they’re prohibitively expensive and our scooter season outside of Vancouver is far too short) recently commissioned some great print ads that simultaneously introudced the new Vespa and harkened the arrival of spring. The theme is butterflies, close enough to the original meaning of the word Vespa (which would be wasp) and a little more appealing than that annoying insect when we’re talking about heralding in a new season.

The thematic unity of the butterfly/scooter concept left the designers free to incorporate elements of different design eras into each particular ad, with splendid results all around. I especially love the 1970s-themed design with its concentric lines and perfect colour scheme. Beautiful stuff.

Our final scooter-related find is this set of stunning high-end helmets from the Parisian designer Les Ateliers Ruby, which top any helmet I have ever seen anyone wearing anywhere. They’re lush, shiny, and thematically perfect for anyone buying a scooter for more than just a convenient method of transport.

I once saw a dude on a vintage vespa in Paris, sporting white converse, good jeans, a perfect vintage button-up shirt, and smoking a Gauluoises–which wasn’t hanging out of his mouth, mind you, but resting there in that inimitable ‘this took me 3 seconds to do but would take you a damn lifetime‘ French style. If he’d had this helmet, we would have our winner in the coolest man ever to ride a scooter. He’s probably already got one, the bastard.