The Alessi design process includes a rigorous monitoring and evaluation module to ensure design ideas are viable for production.
By whatever route the designer’s initial concept has been generated, which may be a sketch, a detailed drawing or a physical prototype, it is analysed first by the company's owner, Alberto Alessi and senior colleagues.
Alessi has a formal set of assessment criteria it applies to a new concept to decide if it should be developed for production.
The formula measures the proposal along four dimensions:
- Function (F): The function of the design. Does it work? Is it practical, functional and labour saving?
- Sensoriality, Memory, Imagination (SMI): Does the design please the senses? Is it memorable? Does it engender emotion?
- Communication, Language (CL): Will the product give its owner status? Does it fit with current trends?
- Price (P): Can the product be made and sold at a sensible price, both relative to substitute products and to the customer’s sense of its value?
Items are given a score from 0 to 5 along each of these four dimensions, with five being the highest score, and three being neutral. A prospective design must have an overall score of more than 12 (equivalent to four neutral ratings) to be considered worth taking forward to the next stage.
In more depth Read about how other companies in our study set
targets for evaluating the success of their products’ design
Alessi emphasises that the formula may need to be applied repeatedly during a project, since during the earliest phases, manufacturing costs and functionality, for example, may not be easy to establish. If the potential success of a concept is not clear from the outset then the design is given to Alessi’s technical department to assess its manufacturability and to its marketing department to consider its saleability. The two departments produce a brief report on the concept and the formula is applied again.
Many projects are frozen after the initial assessment, and their prototypes and production details are placed in the company archive. These products may be revisited in future if trends change.