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The Hague Convention : suitability for present needs and alternative protections for design
Rome March 25, 2011
Welcome ladies and gentlemen and good day to you all, and special welcome for those of you who come from other towns and countries
ECTA is registered in the UK, so you will allow me to continue in english
ECTA and WIPO and the ITALIAN ANTICOUNTERFEITING OFFICE AND PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE, together with ADI and INDICAM thank you for being here
Thanks and good work also to our simultaneous interpreters Silvia Guglielmi and Elisabetta Mariotti
Fine now let’s move ahead
I have a very few lines to read to you, written to favour the interpreters’ work and to avoid digressions, just to warm up
Rome is twinned with London where a similar workshop took place last week, and if Rome is rich of designs London is a synonymous with design, cause London is where modern design was borne : in fact it was in 1851 that the search for beauty as a commodity began with the Universal Exhibition at Crystal Palace, the world’s first industrial fair
And since that event the history of design has run down to our own day : ///the first period with England as a dominant country saw a series of fundamental technicalities like the Thomas Edisons’s electric light bulb, and then the Singer sewing machine and the Remington’s typewriter and so on...///
Design can certainly be listed amongst the best Italian aptitudes, not only because of the so many italian designers but also because of the italian customers’ taste for the selection of designs
So said, how could we contemporary modern customers be less than interested to design ? Let me touch a few issues
Thanks to improved publication means and to their improved diffusion we can well see how design is effectively pushing to claim the recognition of its importance as a science in the collective life and utility
In collective life we wish health, liberty, and pursuit of happiness : designers produce objects of comfort and comfort is part of our happiness; in these very days we have read largely on dailies that urban developments -the so called popular buildings- is going to have a design, because design may make buildings ecological
Question for you : can’t design be defined as the true aesthetics of capitalism ? I would say yes indeed
Remember that in the classical culture the combination of beauty and utility was denied ? the modern design has overcome this limit and made this combination possible
One of our demands is aesthetic pleasure, and with no exceptions we do select products based on the impression that their appearance makes on us
So, design conditions our rationality
Even more , question for you : in your experience, isn’t it true that beauty and goodness are associated ?
Our eyes see what we can recognize, yet modern designers bring us beyond this point and let us meet new things with instantaneous friendly feeling
Innovation becomes progress when it is accessible to people : and what more than design IS accessible to people ?
///jumbo///
May be fantasy has no limits but the market has, we have, we are not prepared to accept always everything new, so that even an excess of progress may lead to failure : designers cope with and interpret what is contemporary or acceptably advanced for us
Future ? Modern design may benefit from an increased quantity of new materials, including colours, and from newly available treatments, with a trend to develop which does not show limits
For these reasons I believe that designers more than ever are the manufacturers of people’s dreams ///have you ever thought of motorcars like design of mobile packaging///
We could go on, but so said, it is clear that we are talking about very valuable intellectual productions and that their protection is worth and here we are with this workshop just aiming at going together through one special protection system
Not all of us, for instance INDICAM, are interested to the technicalities of the procedures but for sure all are interested to strategies and costs/benefits ratio and selective enforcement, and we shall talk of this in few minutes
Now the floor to ...
Domenico de Simone ©2011