Red Dot Design Yearbook 2022/23

What are the innovations that make the Esper Hand prosthesis stand out?
It’s a combination of several factors: anatomical design; the simplicity of parts manufacturing; modularity; scalability.

There is a strong interconnection between technology and design in the Esper Hand – what influence did this have on the creative process?
It was a real challenge. The limitations of both, mechanics and aesthetics, can just crush your soul. But if you can make it through, you rise like a phoenix from the ashes and can do things you could never do before. This is empowering.

What feeling do you want the aesthetic to give the wearer?
We want Espers (that’s what we call our users) to feel comfortable when performing everyday tasks. We want them to feel worthy, confident and independent.

What are the most important insights you have gained from the development process?
The biggest insight is that it is not about developing a product. It’s about rewriting millions of life stories, about making them better. It’s about helping people live more fulfilling lives.

How do you approach a new project?
Design follows a comprehensive and holistic methodology of need, vision and process. Every new product is a new challenge, with its own principles, rules and objectives; that is what makes the industrial design journey so exciting.

What does it take to be a successful designer?
The foundation for becoming a successful designer rests on four essential pillars: focus, training, mentoring and passion. The focus on the goal is essential, because when you are designing something, many factors come into play and must be considered: the needs that the product must meet, the functionality that it must have or could acquire, the aesthetics according to the function itself, the emotion it arouses and much more. Maintaining the focus on the goal without getting lost in the myriad of details that characterise a successful project, is really essential to be able to complete it. Practice and training allow designers to understand what can work and what not, what has already been done and what effects or feedback that has had, and to acquire the sector skills needed to bring each project to a higher level. All this is intertwined with mentoring, that is the ability to learn and be inspired. Passion is the last key element for success, because in a landscape like today’s, which tends more and more towards standardisation, passion is what allows you to go deep into every market and give the product that added value that will make it unique for that market.

How do you approach a new project?
The most important characteristic of a project is to have meaning, i.e. to fulfil unresolved needs and desires. It’s possible to find solutions to specific problems, case by case, developing new modes of construction that often generate unexpected results. You head in one direction, and sometimes, along the way, you realise it should be changed: the right idea comes from “doing”, even by making “incredible swerves”. Experience in the field allows you to test, amongst possible thoughts, which ones are truly feasible; this situation enables you to discover the value of circularity between thinking and doing. I try to start with a constructive idea and not a fixed repertoire of forms, because, at the beginning, the form does not exist; it gradually reveals itself. It is best to adopt an attitude of creative ingenuity, in tune with contemporary techniques, because a pre-set language would produce standardisation of forms and clash with the idea that richness implies the possibility of variation, of difference and therefore of original identity.

Why did you become a designer?
Since I was a child, I was fascinated by how things are made and took apart many. I don’t know, how many airplane models I destroyed in the attempt to improve their acrobatic performance, because the ones in the “kit” were not enough for me. I liked the idea of making a plane designed by myself. So later I “found” myself at the Politecnico di Milano enrolled in mechanical engineering.