Archivio Augusto Morello

Augusto Morello was born in Turin in 1928. After graduating in chemistry, he started working at Olivetti, at that time an exceptional testing ground of industry and culture.
Between 1955 and 1970, he took on the new position of design manager at Rinascente – a role straddling the fields of marketing and production, industrial commissions and designer-architects. He also created the first department for quality and co-designing in a retail company.
He acted as a planning and strategy consultant in private companies and for public administrations, with studies on “product coalitions”, life cycles, hybrid oligopolies, and the relationship between marketing, innovation and management control.
To underscore the necessary union of functionality and aesthetics, Morello founded the Premio per l’estetica del prodotto (Award for Product Aesthetics), which later became the Compasso d’Oro, one of the most coveted titles among designers across the world. In 2001, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his career as an intellectual and manager, which was also interspersed with a string of other prestigious roles: president of the AISM (Italian Association for Marketing Studies), the ADI (Association for Industrial Design), and the ICSID - International Council of Societies of Industrial Design; university lecturer at Politecnico di Milano and IULM in Virginia; editor of magazines including “Stileindustria”; and essayist.
From 2000 to 2002, the year of his death, he was president of the Triennale design museum in Milan.

The selection of materials displayed on the portal includes photographs of Morello’s work for Rinascente, and pictures of the quality control and product analysis lab, the Compasso d’Oro Award, and the lR Centre of Design.