The Tolomeo incandescent desk lamp is an icon of Italian modern design. It was designed by Michele De Lucchi and Giancarlo Fassina in 1986 for the Artemide company. It won the Compasso d'Oro design prize in 1989.
Mario Bellini is an Italian architect and designer. After graduating from the Polytechnic University of Milan in 1959, Bellini pursued a career as an architect, exhibition designer, product designer, and furniture designer during the Italian economic boom of the late 20th century. Bellini has received several accolades in a variety of design fields, including eight Compasso d'Oro awards and the Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Triennale di Milano. In 2019, the Italian President of the Chamber of Deputies, Roberto Fico, awarded Bellini a career medal in recognition of his contributions to Italian architecture and design.
Compasso d'Oro is the name of an industrial design award originated in Italy in 1954. The award was first sponsored by the La Rinascente, a Milanese department store. It has been organised and managed by the Associazione per il Disegno Industriale (ADI) since 1958. It is the first, and among the most recognized and respected awards in its field. The Compasso d'Oro aims to acknowledge and promote quality in the field of industrial design in Italy and internationally.
Achille Castiglioni was an Italian architect and designer of furniture, lighting, radiograms and other objects. As a professor of design, he advised his students "If you are not curious, forget it. If you are not interested in others, what they do and how they act, then being a designer is not the right job for you."
Vico Magistretti was an Italian architect who was also active as an industrial designer, furniture designer, and academic. As a collaborator of humanist architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers, one of Magistretti's first projects was the "poetic" round church in the experimental Milan neighbourhood of QT8. He later designed mass-produced appliances, lighting, and furniture for companies such as Cassina S.p.A., Artemide, and Oluce. These designs won several awards, including the Compasso d'Oro and the Gold Medal of the Chartered Society of Industrial Artists & Designers in 1986.
Neil Poulton is a Scottish product designer, based in Paris, France. He specialises in the design of 'deceptively simple-looking mass-produced objects' and has won numerous international design awards. Poulton is best known for his designs in the fields of technology and lighting design and is often associated with manufacturers LaCie and Artemide.
Artemide is a design-oriented Italian manufacturer founded by Ernesto Gismondi and Sergio Mazza in 1960. Based in Pregnana Milanese, a suburb of Milan, the company specialises in the manufacture of lighting designed by designers and architects.
Tizio is a desk lamp created by Richard Sapper for Artemide in 1972. It was selected for the Compasso d'Oro industrial design award in 1979. An item of it is part of the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and of the Museum of Modern Art.
Richard Sapper was a German industrial designer who was based in Milan for much of his career. He is considered to be one of the most influential figures of post-war Italian design. His products typically feature a combination of technical innovation, simplicity of form, and an element of wit and surprise. He received numerous awards and distinctions, including 11 Compasso d'Oro awards, the Raymond Loewy Foundation's Lucky Strike Designer Award, and the German Order of Merit. Examples of Sapper's work are held by museums such as the Victoria and Albert (V&A) and Design Museum in London, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the ADI Design Museum in Milan, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which counts over 17 of his designs in its collection.
Marco Zanuso was an Italian Modernist architect and designer.
Maria Cristina Mariani Dameno, known as "Cini Boeri" was an Italian architect and designer. She was considered "one of the great pioneering women in Italian design and architecture", who was described as a "formidable architect and designer, paragon of Milanese elegance and verve."
Alberto Meda is an Italian engineer and designer. His work is held in museums around the world. He works and lives in Milan.
Gianfranco Frattini was an Italian architect and designer. He is a member of the generation that created the Italian design movement in the late 1950s through the 1960s and is considered to have played a major role in shaping it.
Lodovico Migliore, nicknamed Ico, is an Italian architect, designer, professor and former professional ice hockey player. He is professor at the School of Design of the Polytechnic University of Milan and he is Chair Professor of the College of Design at Busan Dongseo University in South Korea. He served as chairman of Hockey Milano Rossoblu, an ice hockey team in Elite.A based out of Milan, Italy from 2010 to 2016. He also competed in the men's tournament at the 1984 Winter Olympics.
Setsu and Shinobu Ito are Japanese designers. Their work is stored as permanent collections in the Modern Art Museums in Munich, Germany and Milan, Italy.
Margherita Servetto, better known as Mara, is an Italian architect and designer.
Studio Alchimia was a post-radical avant-garde group founded in Milan in 1976 by Alessandro Guerriero and his sister Adriana with the stated mission of "materializing a non-existent thing into being."
Sergio Asti was an Italian designer and architect, primarily known for his industrial designs for firms such as Artemide, Brionvega, FontanaArte, Gabbianelli, Heller, Knoll, Salviati, and Zanotta.
Ernesto Gismondi was an Italian designer, founder of Artemide. Gismondi was best known for designing light fixtures.
Italo Lupi was an Italian graphic designer and writer.
