Olivetti Biography
Adriano Olivetti supported the importance of the company not only pursuing excellence in its activities, but also knowing how to communicate its values and build an authentic image of the company reality. The company can communicate through the design of a product, the architecture of a factory, the layout of a shop, the graphics of a poster, the text or the design of an advertisement. In traditional Olivetti culture, the beauty of products, buildings, posters or advertising messages does not simply have an aesthetic value: the beauty of the form communicates the reality of the company and, therefore, has a real intrinsic value. Aesthetic choices in all areas of activity are considered equally important as technological or management choices. The "Olivetti style" arises from this culture which permeates every phase of company life, but which assigns a central role to the product and its design. At a time when there were no schools for industrial design in Italy yet, designers were already at work at Olivetti. They did not limit themselves to looking for "a nice dress" for a new machine, but collaborated closely with the designers to give meaning and justification to each shape, both from a communicative, functional and ergonomic point of view. They were asked to design shapes capable of immediately communicating the function of the product, facilitating its use and putting the user at ease, eliminating everything that was superfluous or ambiguous, and expressing the technological character of the product through coherent shapes with the style and values of their time.
