Pallino

Design: Isao Hosoe

Production: Belli e Forti, Italy, 2000

Pallino transforms gravity into an elegant dance. When a napkin is removed, the sphere rotates and the stem sways gently guiding the gesture, and returning to its original position.

Pallino is the son of chaos. I had been working with my collaborators on the development of new products for ‘Belli e Forti’ and after a few hours the work surface was covered by sheets of paper, sketch models, books and research of new concepts, and eventually, cups, empty cups of coffee.

At one point in the afternoon, we needed to have a break and to reorganize the work area.  While we were collecting the sheets of paper, my look had fixed on some sheets that contained various sketches, overlapping free hand pencil development sketches. Perhaps born from unconscious thoughts, perhaps born from conscious ones.

And thus, in the middle of all that chaos, one coherent sketch appeared: one stem, one sphere, that thanks to gravity, it maintains it softly downwards. What was it about? What form called the attention of the group ‘out of the blue’? explaining that is difficult, perhaps impossible. But the situation made it possible, exactly from that point the idea of the ‘Pallino’ was born.

Isao Hosoe