Interview with Tobia Repossi

My grandfather was a painter, and my father was a sculptor later taken to design in the seventies and eighties. It's a family tradition. I was involved at a young age in a creative environment.

I had computers since I was very young and 3d modelling and modelling and visualising objects in space has always been my interest.

I'm a good reference point for startups from Silicon Valley, India and China. We range from electronic products to furniture and our ability to mix ideas taken from different fields makes our designs unique and innovative. I want to keep the level of high standards and execution that we kept in the last few years.

In a world of product design which is becoming so fast the ability of a designer are to manage a connected world where ideas come from California, Plastic from Malaysia, Assembly from China, electronics designed in India and produced in Vietnam... everything distributed from Hong Kong. The entire world is connected in the production chain of an electronic device. A command of all the communication and managing tools involved in the field is mandatory.

in a field where products have a limited shelf life, is definitely to be able to read the market at least six months ahead. Being Up to date and trying to get in touch with the best ideas is the real key to producing innovation.

My day is divided by the time zones of USA and India and China. In the morning we connect with Asia, in the night with America. Mostly designing 3d shapes and engineering plastic shells or mechanical pieces. The rest of the day is spent on learning and researching our clients' markets and new technologies.

We have a very strict process related to approval of the pieces by different companies of electronic engineers, plastic factories, and the client itself. The approval of every piece is a complex procedure that involves almost all the players, not just us.

Definitely always the last one, because we don't have so many recurring works, the amount of market and design. research we have to develop for every product is massive and takes a lot of time.

I admire all my colleagues, I follow them, they inspire me, and they are a source of information: There is never a competition with them, it's always a positive exchange of information. Of the past I admire the great masters like Raymond Loewy, Dieter Rams and the Italian Castiglioni and Munari.

At the moment we are working on exciting projects: a new camera and a coffee machine. But I must say that the best project is always yet to come.

TR & Partners has been on the industrial design market for more than twenty years, with experience in product design for furniture, electronic appliances and accessories. We have worked for major Chinese market-leading companies as well as European and American brands and for startups from China and Silicon Valley. Our designs have been sold in Apple Stores and other famous retail chains and selected for international awards.

Design is the thinking, conceiving and creating and producing process of an object with functionality reproduced in copies.

We are mostly involved in the design of electronic devices and consumer goods..

When I was a child, as an exercise with the help of my father, I designed a thermometer that could be easily understood by kids.

Even if clients think that the key elements are the aesthetic values of the object, its functions or tech specs. I strongly believe that it is usually the distribution channel to make or break the success of a product.

I'm not very interested in the appearance of an object, I love designs that disrupt their market, solve a problem creatively or have a strong degree of innovation.

Sustainability must be the focus, but designing a new product creates always sustainability doubts. We try to alwa

The future of design will be strongly related to machine learning, AI and robots. I'm not saying that design will not be central., in the conceiving chain of a product, but designers in the future will need to shift from mere creative to technicians able to control machine-based software that will design for them.

We run an exhibition called CONNECTED OBJECTS: Design for our Times in Cyprus recently. It was a showcase of all the latest products we designed and wanted to express how connected is design in our times and how it can be possible to design successful objects and products from everywhere in the world regardless of the environment and geography.

I speak a lot about cross fielding and synesthesia, which for me is the key ingredient to add to the standard design thinking process developed by Bruno Munari, refined in Politecnico of Milan and later taken by Stanford and IDEO into the Design Thinking method that we all know.

We don't have one, I hate the world style and I believe it's the death of industrial design. Our style is to design things that work better that what is available today and have a strong degree of innovation.

I divide myself between China, Near East and Europe. Recently Covid has been a great impact on travelling, but I am a strong believer that geography is less and less important. As a result of that, I'm am the typical example of the "Nemo Propheta in Patria" syndrome and I don't have many Italian clients.