MANOLITO&MANOLITA INTERVIEW

How would you describe your work?
Manolito & Manolita is creative design process, balancing between the graceful materials of the nature and the excessive use of them in the cities. Click here to see their catalog.

What made you chose to become a Designer?
Help to make fragments of the built & unbuilt world that surrounds us, more appreciated and more valuable. The same that made us become architects, we suppose.

Do you believe that Design is only about aesthetics or it should have / play a social role in our days?
On one hand, design has been offering strict visual pleasure and awesomeness and on the other hand, has reached out for the technology and fast methods of production, which has being great for advancing but possibly has cut many threads with the human’s touch. More recently, design has been quite selfish, and basically has marginalized itself from the rest of the society. Now, design finds itself ready to react to the alarming call of environmental concerns & unjustified human conditions and more interested in the local productions and fair methods of making, honouring the maker and the user. In simple words, every product can trash this planet a little bit more or can become a method to sustain it.

Does technology play an important role in Design?
It does and it doesn’t, we strongly believe in hand-made or hand-processed products made from good materials, taking a sufficient time of elaboration. When you start reducing everything in to the machine process at the end its only about time and costs, and products are negatively affected. But these days, we are working on our new chair that will be produced by a local design manufacturer and what is pretty amazing is that we together looking for solutions that won’t undermine the human factor and will also include recycled material.

How important in hand sketching for your design process?
Is the starting point! Along with modelling, is a seriously playful process that allows thoughts, imagination, calculations, mistakes, imperfections and hesitations to mix. We carefully keep our paper pads and we draw on each other drawings while they are always with us along the process of design.

Which is the project you feel more connected to or gave you more satisfaction?
Oeuf the Sélénite, the glass chandelier. It is a complex hand-made elaboration and the delicate equilibrium between each various glass pieces really gives us the feeling of a delicate and fragile nature that needs to be basically loved and not exploited.

Which are those elements, according to your opinion, that make a designer better than others?
To be a people’s person, to be knowledge’s explorer, environment’s guardian and imagination’s best friend.

Which other disciplines do you thing have interesting connections with design because nowadays we see people that are multiskilled or/and multitalented?
We have been playing for a while all the instruments in a ‘two man band’: Graphic design, website programming and design, photography, scenography, writing, marketing, business strategy, while we have been designing. This is great, but we are more excited when we collaborate with skilful people. Is a much more enriching process.

Where does your inspiration usually come from?
From our Mediterranean! We are Catalan and Greek and we both have been feeling the salt and the sky but as well the swing moods and the humour of the people. The designs are results of a thinking process that includes this humour, a small dose of irony, comment, suggestion but most importantly pleasure and comfort. But seriously speaking, the South is ready to play a very important role in design and the tight days we go through can make it more valuable and effective.

What advice would you give to the new designers generation from your experience so far?
Remove your designs from the white background!

Faidra Matziaraki
Victor Gonzalez Marti
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