Absorb This First...

Here is a pic of the latest Zagato Design Center treatment of an already amazing automotive - the Aston Martin Vanquish:

The Zagato AM Vanquish

So, I suppose everyone generally accepts that Italy plays a very strong hand in the world of industrial design. Zagato is an obvious and visible 'name' (to car aficionados) of one of the countless ateliers and industrial design studios that exist in Italy.

American industrialists may argue that it is the US that produces the true leading edge of 'design' in the modern world because of the leading role it plays in high speed assembly technology/automated production lines, and in computing and industrial chemicals - all of these elements have led to widespread and commercial and practical utility that the US provides for markets across the globe. And you cannot argue with that proposition when it comes to ranking which country contributes most financially, to industrial creativity and design... Because of the post-WWII 'Marshall Plan,' it is really American know-how and management that produced the economic miracles of Japan and Germany. 

However another way to look at things is to consider the aesthetic aspect of design - and when you go down this route, you inevitably end up in Italy.

Aesthetics is a study of the mind which concerns how our brains interpret things as being ugly, or beautiful. But 'aesthetics' in the most sophisticated modern sense, is also a language with a large and complex vocabulary - and which spans all the senses. The Italians have a lot of words which convey highly-nuanced meanings: 'spianato' for instance, is a word seen in classical music - EG 'Chopin's Andante Spianato.' It means 'smoothed.' In industrial design you can start with a solid shape that has - begins with - sharp edges, and then when you smooth those edges down you get a different final object, with a totally different visual and tactile sense about what it, the object, is or is meant to be compared with the underlying original basic model.

Because we live in a world today in which it has become 'normal' to have a design 'brutalism' expressed in ordinary usual communications, a virtually only semiotic language with no grammar, complex syntax, or subtlety, we would ordinarily never even realize when sophisticated people are employing a complete language in front of our eyes using some other sensory channel than that of words and hearing...

A photograph taken by Brutalism Architecture
photographer, Deane Madsen