I have to say that I've had problems for several years now, because I am a product designer, and I hate objects! But on the other hand, I need to use them. That’s why, for some time, I’ve being trying to eliminate the form of the object and to design it as a pure function. Today, I'll be showing you a series of objects I designed, which help to explain my philosophy.

About six years ago, when I decided to give more importance to ideas than to shapes and other things, I designed a formula with several parameters. What I get from the formula is something I call a mandorla, a kind of aura. I realise now that what really matters with objects (and people), is this aura that you get from different elements. The formula is available to everybody on my home page on the Internet (www.guixe.com), but I have no idea if it produces any side effects. So if you use it, be careful!

The first object (below) is a tattoo of a ten-centimetre ruler that I did for

designers. The designer can use it to measure everything. It’s a temporary tattoo, and the idea was to reverse the trend in tattoos today, which makes them more of a fashion thing than a functional thing. Because in the past, tattoos were more about function than fashion.

Going through the slides, this is from the same series. It’s a tattoo for tourists. You get a map of the subway on your hand, for example; you use for several days, and by the time it has worn off, you already know the subway.

This is another system I did to hold a newspaper, without an object, so you cut the newspaper, you can turn it and hold its sides.

The next one is this frame system, it’s a roll of tape printed in a frame design, called ‘Do Frame’ - people can use the tape to frame whatever they want, to create their own museum. It’s a way of reducing the 'normal' frame to a concept. You can make every kind of shape.

Now I'd like to move on to a project I did three years ago, when I designed objects for fishes. I realised that all aquariums are very kitsch, because they represent an ideal world, or an ideal concept of nature. So I tried to develop a system of objects in which future considerations are involved. In this case, I did the Food Area, in which the fish can eat separately from the other areas. The Aquarium-Within-An-Aquarium, is a system by which, for example, salt-water fish can travel in river water, or also travel in places where there are aggressive fish. Then there is the Self Measurement Area, in which the fish can view its own growth, which normally it can’t. There’s the Colour Area too - when the fish goes inside, it sees the world in another colour, through a filter. The Know Yourself area allows the fish to see how it looks. The Chill-Out Area gives the fish a sphere of privacy - essential, for example, when the aquarist is trying to speak to the fish every day. The Optionals, for example elements to play with, represent the world of products that are available in the marketplace. If the aquarist is smoking, the air is contaminated, so I provided the Air Area - a fresh-air area, where the fish can go and take a breath. The Theme Park is an artificial 'nature' area for recreation. The Temperature Area gives the fish climate control - a choice of cold or warm water, which it can regulate by moving in the space. There’s also the Panorama View, in which the fish can go up to the surface of the water and see the surface from the other side - something it can’t usually do. And finally, I designed fish food in the shape of a frogman, so the fish can have more fun when it eats.

Now I want to show you more real things. This is a project that I did for Spanish shoe company Camper. It was a strange project, because it concerned a temporary shop on the Via Montenapoleone in Milan which needed to be done in three weeks - and was. I imagined doing the shop as an emergency situation, so I was trying to design a kind of choreography that would make it possible. I decided that people would build the furniture out of shoeboxes and that they would also paint the shop red over time. So, when you buy a pair of shoes you can leave a message in a ten-centimetre square in the wall. So here it is at the beginning and slowly, with time, it became redder and redder.

The next image shows the graffiti that people left. Actually, they wanted people to leave ideas about how to improve the world, but they used to leave stuff like love messages. And this is the card that I did to design the shop. I was trying to imagine an air crash, and these cards with information about how to proceed in a panic. So I made these cards to explain how to make the room - I explained it and then the people in charge of making the shop did their own design. This was the about the room, and this was about the furniture. I should add that there are three shops, all different, because people interpret the ‘how to proceed’ card differently. There's a lot of difference between the Italians and the French, for example.

Here is another object I did for Camper, in which the idea is more important than the form. This is a machine to test your two old shoes and compare them with your two new shoes.

So, to move on, now I am starting on food. Actually, I am not so much interested in furniture and all these design items. And I think the real point is to design consumer goods, and foods, because these are the only things that matter. So I’m trying to go ahead with food, but it’s not possible. I always have to exhibit in art galleries, and there are no industries interested in producing it.

This is a picture of house dust in the microscope. What I did with house dust is, I converted it into nutritive dust. I made nutritive dust muesli, which is a system of eating by breathing. I call it Pharmafood, and I did this installation that’s called a Pharmabar. At the bar, you can see the pictures of the food that you are inhaling, and there is a machine that takes the dust and puts it in the air.

OK, now I'll show you how it works. In the dust muesli, there is a particle that’s called a saliva activator. It activates your saliva, so the dust sticks to it and goes to the stomach and not the lungs. So if you go to the bar and you stay there for ten minutes, you get all your nutrients. The dust is made from proteins, minerals and vitamins, and it’s floating in the air; you don’t see it. I recommend drinking a glass of water, or something alcoholic, before leaving the bar.

The next picture shows some 'real' food: that’s a potato omelette, sponsored by Calvin Klein. The idea of sponsored food is to get multinational companies to pay for food, so that it would be possible to eat for free. The idea is from the Palaeolithic, when people could move around Europe taking fruits from the trees and hunting animals - a period of time when people were totally free. I developed sponsored food in the hope that contemporary people could move around, live without working, avoid the stress of having to provide food and therefore develop their own ideas. As I consider nature as a construction to understand reality, this food would prove that nature nowadays is the consumer society.
In the same series, this is a bean which has been sponsored by IBM.

This is another design, for a dish of olives in the shape of a molecule. So it's a kind of three-dimensional snack. I was trying to show the snack as a figure in the way we show food nowadays, in a very pragmatic way.

My last slide is this lollipop. It’s an orange lollipop with an orange seed inside, and it works like this: you eat the lollipop and you spit the seed on the earth. Use the stick to help it grow, and in five years it should hopefully have grown into a new tree.
Thank you.