M: So if the cultures are necessarily equal and ideally different, do you think the chair is a necessity?





U: For sure the chair comes from different necessities that have been changing over evolution. If you think about the Medieval era the single seat was really elitist, the rest of the people would sit on a standard bench. I think that also there are connotations with what kind of food you eat and how you sit in order to eat. We collected a lot of stools during the research of Equally Different, we found many different types, foldable, stackable, made out of any kind of material, but if you make a general guess they all probably come from the first which was probably a rock. There is nothing more to say that design is an idea about how to use something.



M: Aldo Colonetti in an interview with Gillo Dorfles, says that any designer should analyse rituals and habits during the process of making an object. I personally agree I believe that it’s one of the features that make an object different from someone's elses. How important do you think it is to have a cultural approach to a project?



“it’s not that easy to find an object that can truly represent
a culture“




U: When I design for example I don't feel like I design as someone from Austria, or anything related to my country, there are some codes that redirect you on a post-modernist process where you can use these rituals or a traditional attitude of the Austrian during the process of design, touching the stereotypical idea of a culture, it's something that has already been done, Mendini did it for example. I think that design, since the beginning, has been projected with a collaboration with the production and reproduction of the object, 
serving a wide market, where you can have your cultural connotation but it’s because the designer chose to do it, not because it’s required. And that's why it’s not that easy to find an object that can represent a culture truly. Robert Robertson in the 90's came out with the world "glocalism", a mix in between local culture and global influence, and directly led me to think about our second trip to Africa, in Senegal, where we were walking around the local market and we found stoves with Nike logos, which makes us laugh if we think about it, but shows how deep this influence is going.