Enzo Mari Biography
Enzo Mari (Cerano, 1932) is an Italian designer and academic. Born in Cerano to Carolina, from Piedmont, and Luigi from Spinazzola in Puglia, Mari attended the Brera Academy from 1952 to 1956, training in literature and art, and studying the themes of the psychology of visual perception. Having finished his studies, he immediately dedicated himself to the nascent world of industrial design, presenting his first project to the Milanese furniture manufacturer Danese in 1957. Mari applied his personal studies on the themes of perception and the social aspect of design to his production, its function in daily life and the role of the designer in the industrial process. The designer, according to Mari, should not have limited himself to the creation of beautiful objects and pleasant shapes: the functional aspect was essential, as was the efficiency of the design choices in the field of materials and workmanship, there can be no poetry without method . Mari recovers the slogan of the Programmed Art Movement, of which he had been an exponent in his youth, which quotes: our aim is to make you a partner. The user is no longer a passive consumer, but becomes a user of an object and a process (that of design) in which he has an active part. According to another great Italian designer, Alessandro Mendini, Mari is not a designer, if his objects weren't there I wouldn't care much. Mari, on the other hand, is the conscience of all of us, she is the conscience of designers, that's what matters. Critical of what design has become once the golden era of the sixties and seventies ended, Mari blames marketing for having transformed the designer from a creative philosopher into a simple interpreter of trends. In light of these considerations, in 1999 Mari wrote the Barcelona Manifesto, in which he argued that it was necessary to return to the "utopian tension of the origins of design" and invoked a new Hippocratic Oath according to which "ethics is the objective of every project".
