Designer Alessandro Luciani
Designer Alessandro Luciani defines himself as a ‘designer of human experiences’, read about his latest project “Spazio Lenovo” which has won the Retail Design Institute (USA) awards.
Alessandro Luciani is one of the most eclectic Italian and international designers specialized in the world of Retail. He defines himself as a “designer of human experiences” and in fact, his extraordinary personal history and origins, which have influenced his design approach, play a fundamental role in the choices of his professional career. Inspired by a strong desire to go beyond the boundaries of the ordinary, he brings to his projects an innovative, anthropocentric vision, oriented towards sensory engagement and the creation of new experiences, contributing to individual wellbeing, creating a strong emotional bond between the setting, the product, the client and the brand.
Alessandro Luciani was born in a family with a history of over one hundred years in commerce, where innovation and quality have always been the strong points and where he has been able to capture all the dynamics.
He has an original path that started many years ago and it is rich with strong passions and interests, ranging from sport to music, fashion, and technology. As a teenager, he had a passion for designing and producing clothes and furnishing objects, and at the same time, he was able to assemble discarded electronic components to create functional objects. Choosing between his passion for fashion and creativity and his passion for sport, Alessandro Luciani graduated from the ISEF in Aquila in 1992 with a thesis on a subject that had never been addressed before, “The psychophysical preparation of astronauts“, a topic that already reflected his original and unconventional personality. After his studies, he joined the family sports shop where he worked for about 12 years.
In 2011 Alessandro Luciani was selected by Pirelli Tyre, which, in the period after its debut in Formula 1, had started a brand awareness operation with the creation of a new concept to be realized for their main customers, through a design competition in which Luciani participated and he was the winner. It was his first great professional opportunity to apply all his visionary skills and experience to important themes such as visual merchandising, the psychology of colors, the use of materials, sales and marketing techniques, aimed at enhancing the value of the product by rewriting the Hospitality paradigm, creating an extraordinary customer experience.
Since then, Alessandro Luciani has received many important awards and now has more than 25 national and international Retail Design awards, including the American “International Store Design Awards” for Huawei’s first European Experience Store and the prestigious “International Design Competition” “Best of the Best” Class 2020 award from the Retail Design Institute USA for the “Spazio Lenovo” project recently created in Milan, in the central Corso Matteotti.
From the analysis of new Retail Concepts to the Interior Design and Creative Direction, Alessandro Luciani develops new spaces and creates new human and sales experiences, focused on the concept of multisensory, Omni channel, and well-being. The most important feature is to create projects that bring innovation, convey emotions and look to the future, original on the market as the one for the Parafarmacia Dr.Fleming in Milan, a project in 2013 that went beyond all limits, breaking down barriers such as traditional pharmacy counters, introducing technological innovation and rewriting the rules of the new relationship between Brand, Customer, Product, and Environment.
“I feel like a pioneer of the idea of transforming waiting into welcome,” Luciani says, “to move from the perception of lost time to that of time perceived positively as an opportunity for personal enrichment. The use of time in recent years is changing and radically influencing our habits. We spend a lot of time on social networks and live on the Internet. Thanks to new technologies and artificial intelligence, all the services created will increasingly move towards the personalization of all our individual needs and will capture more and more of our attention and time.”
In Alessandro Luciani’s projects, we can identify the will and the ability to go beyond the essential, with more energy, more color, with all the creativity, the attention to every single detail, taste and elegance and the expertise of doing things well, bringing “a breath of fresh air” to the world of design that is perceived and implemented as a point of arrival that transforms “what was there before into something tangible”.
Thanks to a process of virtuous contamination between different worlds, passions, and contexts, Alessandro Luciani’s design approach to Retail Concept, Store Design, and Interior Design is in continuous evolution. His curiosity and expertise take him into a vortex of new ideas and projects that expand into the world of Product Design.
Realized during 2019, ‘Spazio Lenovo’ opened in Milan in September 2020, as the first Lenovo flagship store in Europe, created by the designer Alessandro Luciani. Today, one year later, Luciani wins for this original and challenging project the prestigious ‘International Design Competition’ ‘Best of the Best Class 2020 award from the USA Retail Design Institute, which announced the 25 best retail projects selected from the world’s leading design studios for the 50th edition of its annual Retail Design competition. This award is a reaffirmation – among the many prizes won for this project – of the designer’s innovation and unique design.
The winning projects will go on to represent The Retail Design Institute’s Class of 2020, the ‘Best of the Best’ of shops that opened in 2020 around the world, in all formats and product classifications. The only Italian project with an Italian signature, ‘Spazio Lenovo’ captured the jury’s attention for its unique design approach in which technology and nature communicate, blend and coexist in perfect synergy and harmony, creating a true ecosystem representative of the brand. The award ceremony for this project has entitled the Oscars of the ‘Retail Design’ world, will be celebrated on 12 October 2021 during a virtual event that will be transmitted from New York City on YouTube.
Spazio Lenovo is neither a simple shop window nor a traditional store,” explains Alessandro Luciani, “but a multifunctional space with a strong brand identity, in which I have tried to blend two apparently antithetical universes to create a fluid, elegant, colorful, and pleasant environment, where the relationship between nature and technology becomes easy, immediate and functional. I wanted to recreate the sociability and sharing of spaces in a Greek agora and, at the same time, shorten the distance between the outside and inside worlds. A technological and experiential environment designed around man”.
Alberto Spinelli, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer EMEA of Lenovo highlights the originality of the project: “We are proud of the awards that Alessandro Luciani is gathering for Spazio Lenovo; receiving an international recognition such as the ‘Best of the Best Class 2020 from the prestigious Retail Design Institute is testimony to the absolute uniqueness of the project,” he commented. “A place where people can live our vision Smarter Technology for All: a world where every person and business can access the technology and make a positive impact on society.”
The person at the center…
The eclectic Italian designer’s design philosophy has always been characterized by a marked anthropocentric character, which places the Person at the center of his thoughts and creations, in an innovative vision oriented towards the involvement of emotions and the creation of new experiences. Speaking of himself, Alessandro Luciani defines himself as a ‘designer of human experiences’. Spazio Lenovo in Milan is much more than a ‘shopping experience’, with its harmonious synthesis of colors, nature, and technology, where everyone can explore inviting and innovative spaces and live an experiential adventure under the claim ‘Smarter technology for all’.
Multifunctional spaces and colors…
The store has two levels: street level and first floor. The ground floor is an institutional space designed to host events and presentations of both products and novelties, in collaboration with sponsors and partner companies. The first floor, divided into areas, houses the commercial and business spaces, the Legion area dedicated to gaming, the virtual reality and educational area, the Motorola corner (a Lenovo brand), a B2B area, an auditorium area, and a Bistrot designed to be a meeting point, a co-working space and a moment to generate relationships.
Color is the dominant element linking the whole project. In his creative work, Alessandro Luciani dedicates precise and meaningful attention to the theme of color, starting from the shared concept that color has the capacity to generate and influence our emotions and, as such, plays a decisive role in design elements and is an essential part of the human experience. Here, the colors are bright and vibrant: turquoise, fuchsia, orange, lilac, blue, and flag bud green are carriers of positive energy and recall the brand’s graphic patterns. The use of dichroic glass allows for a play of reflections of different colors and recalls the chromatic change that occurs with the passing of the hours of the day, underlining once again the constant interplay generated between inside and outside, between natural and artificial light, between being in the open air and being in an enclosed space.
The lighting design is a rhythmic play of LEDs, placing the light points where they are needed, deliberately avoiding static lighting schemes, and favoring ‘natural’ effects with warm LEDs, as if the sun’s rays could ‘enter’. The presence of a Led wall along the entire height of the store makes it possible to generate a direct, continuous flow of communication.
Design philosophy…
The philosophy that inspires the whole project of the ‘Spazio Lenovo’ speaks of a constant relationship towards the creation of a space where people can feel good and have new experiences, having the pleasure of being in an outdoor space, while being indoors. For achieving this goal, in addition to the expert use of colors, the project includes 13 columns covered with stabilized vertical greenery, porcelain stoneware floors with a ‘seeded’ effect to recall the path of a garden, and furnishings designed ad hoc by Alessandro Luciani, taking the graphic signs of the brand, and reinterpreting them in the design of furniture accessories. In particular, the large floor tables with solid surfaces based on an original element that at first sight recalls the stem of a flower, taking up the ‘L’ of Lenovo. In this way, through an innovative design gesture, the graphic sign is transformed into an object and the product decorates the space, generating virtuous contamination that reinforces the link between the environment, the product, the customer, and the brand
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