Ilse Marchetti's studio in the Brera district contains a surprising number of windows and a surprising absence of screens. There are no monitors on the long walnut table, no tablets propped against the walls. Instead, the room is full of glass: sheets of it leaning in frames, small slabs arranged on the windowsill, a tall cylinder of water that catches the afternoon light. It takes a while to realise that almost all of it is quietly functional.
Marchetti, who trained as an architect before moving into interaction design, founded her studio, Vitrine, eleven years ago with a single, stubborn thesis. The screen, she believes, became the dominant object of modern life almost by accident, and it is far too loud. Vitrine designs interfaces for homes, hotels and cultural institutions that push information back into the surfaces around us, where it can be glimpsed rather than stared at.
The results are subtle to the point of invisibility. A slab of smoked glass on a hotel desk shows the time and weather only when a hand approaches, the letters rising from the depth of the material like frost. A museum case in Turin displays the provenance of the object inside it as faint etched text that seems to hover above the glass. A kitchen counter in a Geneva apartment reveals a recipe, step by step, beneath the chopping board.
Calm as a discipline
Marchetti borrows the idea of calm technology from an older strand of computing research, but she has turned it into something closer to a grammar. Her studio maintains a handbook, now more than two hundred pages long, that governs everything from the speed at which text may fade to the maximum brightness permitted after sunset. Nothing may flash. Nothing may move faster than a leaf would fall. Colour is rationed like a precious spice.
A screen asks you to come to it. Glass can simply be there, waiting, the way a window is there. — Ilse Marchetti
This restraint has made Vitrine sought after by clients who can afford to be particular. Hoteliers love it because guests photograph the rooms but rarely complain about technology they cannot understand. Collectors love it because the interfaces do not compete with the art. Marchetti admits that her work currently lives mostly in expensive places. She is candid that calm, like silence and space, has become a luxury in a world engineered for distraction.
Still, she hopes the principles will travel. Her studio has begun working with a public library in Bologna, designing reading tables that display catalogue information directly on their wood-and-glass surfaces, and with a hospital in Verona on patient rooms that show only what a patient needs, when they need it. These projects pay less, she says, but they are the ones that keep her awake at night, in the good way.
As I was leaving, Marchetti walked me to the window and pressed her palm flat against the glass. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, very faintly, a line of text appeared beneath her hand: the name of a street in Milan and the words rain after six. She lifted her hand and it was gone. That, she said, is the whole idea. It was there when you wanted it, and then it let you go.
