He left from Turin and arrived in Wenzhou, in China. Transforming his dreams into sustainable projects. Profession: university professor ed eco designer. Design beautiful things to protect the Planet. Is called Maurizio Vrenna, is 34 years old, it is the symbol of a new generation of emerging designers who study in the best Italian universities and then travel the world. To make an impact. He has lived in China for 9 years. Round trip twice, then stopped. Today he is Assistant Professor of Design at Kean American University in Wenzhou, Zhejiang.
“I move between the world of education, that of research, and that of practice.” For your doctoral thesis, you created a device for produce spirulina at home (protein-rich seaweed) which has won international awards and is now on display in a Chinese museum. “Design doesn’t just mean creating something aesthetically beautiful, it means do something useful and sustainable at an environmental, social and cultural level”.
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His is a story that teaches us not to be afraid to leave, to seize opportunities wherever they are and to connect people, worlds and materials. “I want to act as a bridge between different countries, such as China, the United States and Italy, even if they are not that different. I say to designers: travel the world and you will become better designers.”
Rewind. Vrenna studies at the Polytechnic of Turin. Master’s Degree Course in Eco Design. During this period, in 2015, she applied for a scholarship in Brazil. He gets it but then rejects it. “I wanted to bet on a more difficult goal.” She tries with China. She discovers Politong, a training program between the Polytechnic of Turin, the Polytechnic of Milan and the Tongji University of Shanghai. She manages to get in, stays there for a year, gets a double degree. “Here I met one of the best Chinese professors, Lou Yongqi, founder of the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University, and I decided to stop. I also worked at a startup, but I quickly started to realize that companies weren’t ready to listen to what I had to say on the sustainability front. When I said “I’m an eco designer”, they asked me to design green plastic objects… At that point, almost disheartened, I asked myself: what can I do to be listened to? I called the professor Pier Paolo Peruccio, full professor of Design at the Polytechnic of Turin. And he replied: “Apply for a doctorate and if you win the tender, I’ll wait for you”.
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From China, Vrenna thus returns to Italy. “Doctorate in management production and design, a hybrid between management engineering and design. However, the program requires a period abroad and while reading a book I discovered the professor’s fascinating research in the field of environmental sustainability Liu Xin, at Tsinghua University in Beijing, the most prestigious in China and among the 20 best in the world. I wrote to him: would you tutor me for my doctoral thesis? Due to a series of favorable astral connections, his answer was yes. “The thesis project focuses on sustainable food production in urban areas.” The global population is growing exponentially. There will be no more land to use, it is necessary find alternative and sustainable ways to produce food“.
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To find an answer to the problem Vrenna designs The Algae Grower, a device for producing fresh spirulina algae at home (in the photos below). “It’s a completely in-house project open source. I keep getting emails from people asking me: How did you create this? Can I 3D print it? Can I improve it?”
It was selected among the 150 best projects in the world by Prototypes for Humanity, which every year in Dubai rewards ideas from 700 universities capable of having an impact. “Algae Grower also won the first prize of the China Industrial Design Competition. And now it is on display at the Fashion&IM Design Center in Wenzhou, a platform created by the local government to encourage the transformation and industrial strengthening of the city through design, engineering , and artificial intelligence”.
From this project another was born: The Algae Station, the prototype of a station for the production of spirulina at an urban level.
“Spirulina is an algae that extracts CO2 e it can purify the air of cities. In the next few years, over 50% of the population will live in large centers and this algae could be a solution not only for food but also for carbon capture. New companies could be born that cultivate it and new jobs.”
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Meanwhile the pandemic arrives, Vrenna returns, starts looking for opportunities after her doctorate in Italian universities. “But it was a bit like standing in line.” She discovers Kean University, an American university in New Jersey, with a campus in Wenzhou. He applied in September 2020 and was called to coordinate the industrial design course. “We were in the middle of the pandemic. I took a crazy flight: Turin-Frankfurt, empty flight. Frankfurt-Chengdu. And once I arrived, a 3-week quarantine in a hotel in Chengdu”.
“Living and working here is an extraordinary experience and a unique opportunity to create sustainable design also on a cultural level. There is a village nearby that is dying, the young people have all left, but in the 1950s it was the place of excellence for the production of bamboo paper. Beautiful paper, which smacks of history, but which people no longer like. I asked myself: how can we enhance it and bring it back to life? We have designed innovative lamps, combining metal with paper, creating a contrast between industrial production and manual production, present and past, a fusion between Western and Eastern culture”.
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Vrenna organizes workshops, works to innovate arctic arts, pushes kids to produce from a circular economy perspective, changing the material, color and size of ancient things. “Always ask yourself: Is it necessary to produce new things? You can recover traditions, change details, start from what’s already there, mix, compose.”
And if you have any doubts, Vrenna invites you to take a trip to the Celestial Empire. “You will understand how things work, how much stuff is produced, you will experience unbridled consumerism first-hand. There are factories that play techno music to make people produce at a higher rate. Some are no longer registered as factories, but as Internet companies. They have very advanced management software: they monitor production, waste, quality and give bonuses based on what has been produced. To be truly sustainable, a project cannot involve a few people. There are 8 billion of us on this planet. To have an impact you need to start projects that touch billions of people.”
Vrenna knows Chinese, she studies it every day. He married a Chinese woman. Their first child is on the way. “I’m learning the language to be accepted. I find it very interesting to be able to bring the know-how, culture, professionalism that we have in Italy and at the same time learn from Chinese Asian culture.”
Will you come back? “Italy is there and will always be there. And I trust that it will be ready to welcome me. I would like to live a little in Italy, a little in China, a little in the United States, a little in East Asia. And I would like my son to live a rich life and to be able to see all the facets – beautiful and not so beautiful – of our world. I don’t want him to live in a bubble.
I wanted to leave, explore, look for new opportunities that perhaps, if I hadn’t taken them, would have remained there or would have been chapters in other people’s lives. I studied in Italy and then left. But I have learned that roots are not abandoned, but extended. Sometimes I have a bad feeling in my mouth for not having stayed in my country, but how many discoveries have I made along the way?”.
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– 2024-04-10 01:42:26
