| Salone Internazionale HOST 2005
1. ISA: surprise yourself
Imagine the lens of a telescope.
Without your eye, and a horizon to gaze at, it would have no purpose.
But when you point it at an objective, then you fully understand its worth.
Now, imagine the new ISA projects and project them onto your daily work.
Put your eye to the telescope, and surprise yourself.
It will be hard for you to imagine another instrument that enhances your work, and at the same time enhances your image: every ISA product can be recognized for its design, and gives recognition to those who have chosen ISA for their work.
Now, point the telescope toward the horizon again: even if you keep it pointed at the same spot, you will see changes happening.
Because time has passed. The light has changed. It’s another hour of the day. And not one hour is like the one before it or the one after it.
ISA knows this – and that is why it has chosen to be with people 24 hours a day. Pampering them in a relaxing atmosphere, with breakfast at the coffee bar or a treat on break, recharging them at lunchtime, making shopping easier at the supermarket, delighting them with a treat at a pastry or ice cream shop, or captivating them in the colorful after-hours atmosphere of a pub or nightclub.
Every one of these moments is unique, and has its own needs, its own expectations. ISA knows this – and that is why it guarantees products that incorporate them, offering a complete answer to every need throughout the day.
Designs true to ISA’s own distinctive philosophy, giving maximum support in enhancing the products displayed.
An extraordinary achievement, in line with the modern needs of bars, cafés, restaurants and shops: a multifunctional shop.
ISA interprets the needs of its customers, satisfying their needs and offering solutions that always look ahead, to the market, to its surroundings, to its evolution.
But that’s not all. Go back and get our virtual telescope. Point it at the horizon again. Give it to your neighbor and ask him or her to do the same thing.
You’ll discover that the same horizon at the same time is not the same to you as it is to them. That happens because you have different eyes.
That is why we decided to couple our name with a phrase: “your visible value”.
It means that today ISA is a relational brand, that you choose to make it become your own. Because although the product – the telescope lens – might be the same everyone, our eyes are what make the difference.
ISA gives visibility to the value of every single customer.
Your Visible Value reinforces the new ISA mission: business partners, not just suppliers; a solution brand, not just an industrial brand; a different key player in every one of the 24 hours in a day.
A key player, but only together with you.
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2. ISA's HOST 2005 is interpretation
Host 2005: we thought that presenting new products just wasn’t enough. Everyone does it or will do it. This time, the newness of a product wouldn’t have been enough. ISA decided to do more: not new products, but four new furnishing interpretations that will characterize the future history of shops, restaurants and bars in the upcoming years.
New collections that are a mirror of the present, interpreting trends and at the same time outlining the future, anticipating needs.
We wanted to give our collections a strong personality, something the customer could identify with. We worked hard to make our products capture and embody the new spirit that gives life to shops.
Ambitious goals, which we were able to achieve through the great design skills of the ISA staff, teamed up with the creativity of world famous architects.
We turned to four of the most extraordinary leaders in the world of international architecture and design: Claudio Silvestrin, Gae Aulenti, Isao Hosoe and Simone Micheli. With them we delved into the daily life of cafés and bars, exploring the feelings, moods, needs and expectations pervading the atmosphere there. We analyzed everything that seemed interesting, an extraordinary series of concepts: goals, flexibility, dynamics, interactions, operating economy, display, cleaning, ergonomics, ability to communicate, ecology. We shared our suggestions and advice with Claudio Silvestrin, Gae Aulenti, Isao Hosoe and Simone Micheli. Their genius, taste, and extraordinary vision of future shops, cafés, restaurants and bars and creativity did the rest. They combined, refined, and interpreted everything we had found. It was all studied, interpreted and created at our Research and Development department and transformed into unique projects that break away from the past.
The results are a renewed version of Mediterraneo and three totally new collections: Ghiacci, Frame, and Tam Tam.
New concepts, not just new products.
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3. FRAME by Simone Micheli
Celebrating the Expo
Sandwiches? Cakes and pastries? Or simple snacks? No, don’t make that mistake: what you are seeing through the glass are jewels. Precious, intriguing masterpieces that are to be treated, of course, like you would treat the most precious things; to be enhanced by giving the greatest attention to every last detail. This was the idea Simone Micheli had in mind when he put his pencil to designing Frame.
Micheli said his aim was to create “a formal ensemble of content, which celebrates the products as if they were precious jewels.”
And looking at the results, he succeeded.
But Frame does more than just enhance the product.
Micheli added a second, decisive element, to give this line a complete, finished feel. And here then is the difference, that “possibility” of personalizing the project that transforms Frame into a surprisingly flexible collection: the interactivity of light.
“A chameleonic expression of interactivity,” Micheli rightly maintains.
Frame transforms into a “flexible collection, amazingly customizable that uses light intriguingly to lend a changing atmosphere to rooms depending on the different moments when it is used.”
Frame is all of this: enhancing the product in an interactive setting, while enhancing itself at any time of day and in any situation.
4. I GHIACCI by Claudio Silvestrin
Innovative, futuristic form
A warming coolness: sound like a paradox? It is, but only in part.
Check out the I Ghiacci line designed by Claudio Silvestrin.
Look at it carefully and imagine the pleasure of enjoying an ice cream, a custard, or even just a coffee.
As Silvestrin himself tells it, “maybe we take it for granted, or we don’t pay much attention to it, but those few minutes we spend at the café or ice cream parlor are often moments of joy, warmth, friendship, of perceptive pleasure, of a small desire that will be gratified. It is the vibration we feel when we disobey the doctor, the dietician; the delight of chatting pleasantly with a friend. I can’t remember ever having an argument standing in front of showcase full of pastries, ice cream, aperitifs.” And do you know why all this happens? Because the counters in the I Ghiacci line are never cold. Paradoxically, in fact, it is a counter that warms us psychologically.
“I though of all this,” continues Silvestrin, “when I was designing I Ghiacci. I wanted to give the bar counter a strong, assertive, dynamic configuration. I think it deserves it. I chose an innovative, futuristic form, because I wanted it to last over time. I imagine it in the airplanes and spaceships that will be carrying us through the skies of the future: those will be much more pleasant trips.”
I Ghiacci speak just one language, that of the future, a design projected forwards in time, a line that stands as the ideal interpreter of the ISA philosophy: innovate your thinking before innovating the product, always looking ahead to the future.
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5. TAM TAM System by Isao Hosoe
Dynamism and flexibility
What is the greatest achievement today regarding service in an establishment open to the public? We believe it has to do with being able to respond effectively to continuously changing demands. Every day, within a single room or environment, there is an alternation of profoundly different situations, such as the first coffee of the day or a coffee “on the fly,” a working lunch, an afternoon snack or happy hour. Each of these is a ritual that has its own pace, atmosphere, and gestures.
Isao Hosoe designed the Tam Tam System around this “behavioral energy,” the outcome of direct observation and experience. Hosoe himself explains, “Therefore the designing was guided by the principles of interaction science, such as affordance, personal space and ergonomics, and it coincided with the search for a flexible tool, which could respond to the needs of the new urban nomadism and with the identification of four primary actors involved in the action: the customers, the owner of the establishment, the products displayed and, last but not least, the setting in which the furniture is placed.
Thus was born Tam Tam, evoking the modern version of an ancestral instrument. Because the “drum” (“tom tom”) is the heart of the system, an element that acts as a hub around which the components can be rotated to create original arrangements and new ways of interacting.
The result is an “open” project that gives greater accessibility to the products, improved communication and the elimination of the typical “rush hour” problems and inconveniences that block visibility and create needless frustrations and losses of time.
6. MEDITERRANEO by Gae Aulenti
The Reinterpretation Of A Success
Only those who have traveled every known road can have the desire, imagination and strength to invent new roads. Because only those who know the rules through and through can dare to make up new ones without being presumptuous,
Gae Aulenti has written not just a page, but an entire chapter in the book on the history of the Italian coffee bar – thanks to her fundamental intuition.
“We thought,” she recounts, “that in the 1990s we needed a moderation, one so strong as to constitute that element of simplicity which is the hardest thing to find...,” but that is lasting over time.
Mediterraneo is just that. It is a journey to the cradle of the most ancient values in discovery of new frontiers for well-being. Mediterraneo is the successful achievement of a long quest to ingeniously combine innovation and tradition, enhancing natural materials with the most modern technologies.
Mediterraneo, a great result born of the collaboration between ISA and Gae Aulenti.
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