DIALOGO DESIGN: USELESS

Credits & Description:

Category: Self Promotion

Advertiser: DIALOGO DESIGN

Product/Service: CREATIVE AGENCY

Agency: DIALOGO DESIGN

Date of First Appearance: Aug 12 2010

Entrant Company: DIALOGO DESIGN, Rio De Janeiro, BRAZIL

Creative Director/Designer: Ricardo Saint-Clair (Dialogo Design)

Creative Director/Designer: Rodrigo Westin (Dialogo Design)

Media placement: Design Object - Trade Design Fair - 15 August 2011



Describe the brief from the client

Dialogo Design is a multi-disciplinary studio with focus in communication, balancing corporate disciplines with authorial work. We had to present our new line of products at a trade Brazilian fair (Paralela Gift), positioning ourselves as a company that also aims to discuss need, joy and consumption.



Describe the challenges and key objectives

In a place with 700 exhibitors and 60,000 attendees we find an incredible amount of commoditised and pointless products.



Describe how you arrived at the final design

We decided to design a product that was truly useless. The object was made by the word itself: “inútil”, that means useless in Portuguese. A provocative dialogue about what is worthy, functional, and meaningful to buy.



Give some indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

“Useless” played an essencial role triggering curiosity and entertainment. We sold 75% of our available stock gathering 82 new shopkeepers. The product was also selected for the exhibition “Rio + Design” at Milan Week 2011. Another interesting result is anthropological: even with its obvious lack of usage, everyone tried to define a function for it (book divider, CD holder, paper weight), emphasising the human behaviour, necessity, and assumptions towards designed objects.