Many designers will start their work on paper, creating the final form of an object through sketching, and then figure out how to actually make it. Marco Cabardo is a designer who decided to do the opposite. What he thinks about is the process, the tools, the limitations, the natural behaviors of materials and shapes, and he has built an entire practice on the belief that if you get the process right, the form will take care of itself.
Industrial design, as a discipline, is based on a linear process that is usually distinctly divided between an initial creative sprint, followed by a technical phase, where a mold or mold is made to reproduce the original idea with as little deviation as possible. When these processes are mixed to the point where they are no longer distinct from each other, new possibilities open up that we could never have thought of before.
Peppers © Marco Campardo
Jello by Marco Campardo © Galerie Kreo
Marco Campardo © Matteo Bianchessi
Elle Collection © Marco Campardo
Peppers © Marco Campardo
Elle Collection © Marco Campardo
Jello by Marco Campardo © Galerie Kreo
Marco Campardo © George Baggaley
George Collection © Marco Campardo
Jello by Marco Campardo © Galerie Kreo
George Collection © Marco Campardo
Peppers © Marco Campardo
George Collection © Marco Campardo
Peppers © Marco Campardo
Jello by Marco Campardo © Galerie Kreo
Marco Campardo’s process-based design practice:
Jello collection
A clear example of Campardo’s practice is the Jello collection. Order from Rome Macro Museum to produce 30 stools on a shoestring budget and in five days, Campardo didn’t have the time or financial means to make them with a proper mold. So, he made the stools out of cardboard scraps, covered with packing tape and poured with polyurethane. What started as an obstacle became the project’s opportunity and created an aesthetic that was unlike any other product on the market. Today, the collection is produced in collaboration with Gallery Kreo in Paris, it expanded from stools to dining tables, consoles, benches and more.
Unlike many other designers, Campardo is not tied to one material, but the philosophy found in Jello is the main line of his work. From brass L profiles welded to furniture for the Ella collection, retrieved Alps veneer cuts stacked and carved for the George tables, in expanded clay bound with sugar for a Self-refrigeration screen designed to disintegrate after use, the works are united not by a visual signature but by a love of experimentation, questioning and research.
The Theory-Practice Framework
This approach, proposed by Campardo, is called “practice theory framework”, a circular model that emphasizes that theory and practice are mutually dependent. In the designer’s own words, “The practice-theory framework that informs my work is circular rather than linear. Practical experiments generate questions that are then explored through inquiry and critical inquiry. In turn, theoretical thoughts are returned to the lab and tested through prototypes, materials and processes. This constant exchange allows projects to evolve organically with outcomes emerging from the process itself.”
The result is that neither concept nor execution is allowed to dominate: practical creation is not simply the illustration of a theory decided in advance, and theory is not an isolated commentary applied after the object is completed. It also explains why the Campardo lacks a specific personal style or look: if the results are meant to evolve organically from this exchange, committing to a specific look or material beforehand would short-circuit the cycle before it has a chance to work.
Peppers
His most recent work, Pepperstakes this logic even further: using an actual pepper as a mold for molten glass. Born as part of his educational workshops at Grymsdyke Farmthe project teaches students how making can be a form of inquiry in its own right, exploring how objects can gain meaning through it.
“Peperoni came from a desire to explore the role of the mold through a series of simple questions: Is it possible to find a ready-made mold in nature? Is there a material that can be shaped with basic tools like a knife or a spoon, while still withstanding molten glass at temperatures of around 1000°C? How would this change the way we can use an ordinary mold as a minimal investment? discarded food?”
As he frames it, the ambition is both pedagogical and economic: “Using peppers as an accessible and unexpected mold-making material, the project allows students to explore and understand the concept of mold through direct experience without the need for expensive industrial tools. Working with a material that is familiar, cheap and ephemeral encourages participants to challenge conventional assumptions about manufacturing value and production.”
Construction as a design process
What Peperoni and the rest of Campardo’s the paper argues that the artifact is not really the point, or rather, it is not the only point. Evolving the discipline of design is not only about producing better end products, but also about advancing and expanding the processes that create those products in new and unexpected ways that simply cannot occur if you follow a traditional design path.
Industrial design has historically been organized around the idea of reproducibility and standardized processes. This logic has produced enormous gains in efficiency and consistency, but it has also trained generations of designers to treat the engineering of manufacturing as a service to be used rather than part of the creative process in its own right. By treating construction as a generative act rather than mere translation, Campardo reopens questions that mass production tends to close. A pepper that survives the high temperatures of molten glass is an almost comical challenge, but it questions what the definition of a proper tool really is and who set those terms.
As manufacturing becomes more centralized and capital-intensive, and visualization of concepts also becomes easier with artificial intelligence and other digital tools, the issue of today’s designers being too disconnected from practical manufacturing processes becomes problematic. Few young designers can afford to test an idea before committing to it industrially, and many are satisfied with high-quality digital renderings of their work. Campardo’s pedagogic approach models a way to keep experimentation cheap as well as to keep horizons more open, building designers less dependent on inherited assumptions and fully in charge of their creativity practice.
