Meet the designer
Tobia Zambotti
Multidisciplinary Designer @tobia_zambotti
Tobia has traveled the world, found the courage to take the plunge, and start from zero driven by a strong passion and overwhelming courage. Confident of his role in the environmental emergency we are experiencing, he has created projects and installations that are both provocative and fascinating, charged with a value that cannot leave you indifferent.
Read the interview we did with him and let yourself be inspired!
Hello Tobia, nice to meet you. Would you introduce yourself? Who are you? How you started your career as designer?
I’m a multidisciplinary designer from Italy and I live in Reykjavik together with my girlfriend Benedetta and our 1 half-year-old son Michelangelo.
After studying architecture in Venice (IUAV) and interior design in Milan (Politecnico di Milano) I went to Shanghai to work for Alberto Caiola, an award-winning interior design studio.
This experience gave me the right amount of awareness and positivity to start working as an independent designer. As a matter of fact, when I decided to leave the chaotic and polluted Chinese city for an opposite lifestyle in Reykjavik I immediately founded Atelier Tobia Zambotti – a sustainable and future-oriented multidisciplinary design studio.
I mean, usually, a 29-year-old designer with no money (zero, I swear) doesn’t start freelancing in a new country, it’s definitely not the wisest thing to do. But I did it, why?
Because I’ve been forced to be very brave in my life, from the difficulties I found the strength that allowed me to self-finance my studies with the goal to social climb and achieve what I dreamt of: being able to live with my ideas with no (or very few) compromises. It’s a privilege that has to be earned.
How would you define your works? What are the drivers and values that inspire you?
The characteristics of my design projects represent my personality. They are bold, radical and polemic and they definitely aren’t bound to the past / the traditions – just like me.
Despite being a multidisciplinary designer, I try to give my projects a strong visual identity as well as a conceptual one. The values which drive my work are uniqueness, sustainability and accessibility – a fresh and clear concept that everyone can understand quickly.
My main inspiration are multidisciplinary designers such as Virgil Abloh, Lucas Muñoz and Harry Nuriev.
“I’ve been forced to be very brave in my life, from the difficulties I found the strength that allowed me to self-finance my studies with the goal to social climb and achieve what I dreamt of”
Tobia Zambotti – Tobia Zambotti Atelier founder
We came across your interesting work during the Design Week in Milan with your “couch-19” and we were really impressed from it!
Could you tell us more about this project? What’s the link between the COVID-19 masks and the couch?
Where do people spent most of their time during lockdowns? On their couches, of course. To me both sofas and face masks visually characterize the pandemic era, this is why I decided to create an iconic project capable of representing this. Couch-19 is an iceberg-shaped (iceberg is an icon of the global warming) modular pouf filled with single-use masks collected from the streets of my hometown in the north of Italy. The project’s goal was to highlight the absurd pandemic-related pollution and thanks to the impressive media coverage that the project got I’ve been able to send a strong message to the entire world: even in critical times like the one we’re living in, we don’t have to forget about our natural environment.
I see Couch-19 as a provocative artwork and not as a real couch but unfortunately, many people have made the mistake of judging the project as if it were a piece of furniture. This is why I have also received many critics, especially on social media, which is something that I really love… I mean, you can’t please everyone when you do something very far from your comfort zone.
All your projects are in some way connected with sustainability, why do you think it’s important and what do you think your role is as artist and designer towards sustainable issues?
I believe that there’s no need anymore to explain why being sustainable is fundamental for the future of our planet. I don’t want to steal David Attenborough’s job.
My role as a young creative designer is to find a cool way to spread meanings but unfortunately, my contribution can’t really make the difference: the mainstream part of the creative community which is capable of reaching a wide audience needs to feel this responsibility but sadly most of the big brands that everyone knows do greenwash.
We must become conscious consumers and conscious designers in order to stop this dangerous over-consumption.
Which of your projects do you think represents you the most? Why?
Mother Nature Fan Club is the project that represents me the most because it’s simple, spontaneous, refined yet very bold.
The project faces the topic of climate change with humor, encouraging people to be nature’s fan and giving them the chance to contemplate the lovely view over Borgarnes Bay, a small village on the southwest coast of Iceland.
The temporary art installation has been created using discarded plastic stadium seats, creating a poetic setting dedicated to people who think that sunsets and rainbows are more exciting than any kind of sporting event.
Temporary installations are usually not sustainable at all, there’s a lot of material waste just to please the visitor’s eyes for a couple of days. Mother Nature Fan Club had to be different, otherwise, it would have been a contradiction. This is why it is a zero-waste (and zero cost) project which I’m still dreaming to build permanently somewhere in the world.
Tell something to our community of crafts lovers and makers.
Be bold, be brave, be my IG follower.
Les Izmoor 
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