Clino Trini Castelli

Clino Trini Castelli (born in Civitavecchia, 1944) is an Italian industrial designer and artist. He used the concept of "noform" throughout his work in environmental and industrial design, developed through the use of Design Primario and CMF design.

Career After graduating school in Turin in 1961, Castelli started working at the design center of Fiat Automobiles. After three years, he moved to Olivetti in Milan, where he worked in the studio of Ettore Sottsass. At the same time, he was part of the growing Arte Povera movement in Turin, alongside artists like Michelangelo Pistoletto, Piero Gilardi and Alighiero Boetti. In Milan, he worked in fashion, meeting Nanni Strada and Elio Fiorucci. A year later, he founded the CDM company with the same partners. In 1978, he founded the Colorterminal IVI di Milano, the first center to use RGB color technologies and CMF design, and four years later, he formed Gruppo Colorscape for urban planning.

Throughout the 1980s, he worked with Louis Vuitton and Vitra in Europe, Herman Miller in the United States, and Mitsubishi in Japan. During this period, he re-established his partnership with Fiat, which led to the creation in 1985 of the Centro di Qualistica Fiat, the "Qualistic Compendium" program with Olivetti, and CMF product range planning with Cassina. He was also one of the first in Europe to explore the concept of home automation, in collaboration with Bticino, Legrand, and Somfy.

During the 1990s, he started new design ventures in Japan with Hitachi, Toli, and Itoki. At the same time, he taught design at the Politecnico di Milano and the Domus Academy, of which he was one of the founders in 1983. From 1994 to 2005, he wrote articles on design culture for the magazine Interni. In 2000, he founded the Qualistic Lab, a division of Castelli Design that developed new instruments for the emotional positioning of images and products.

Awards ADI Compasso d'Oro award for Meraklon Sistema "Fibermatching 25", Centro Design Montefibre, 1979 ADI Compasso d'Oro award for Abito Politubolare, Calza Bloch, 1979 Interior Design Magazine Annual Award for Showroom Design, Herman Miller. Neocon XV, Chicago, 1983 IBD Product Design Gold Award for Color, Fabric, Finish Program for Seating, CMF Design for Fabric Collection, Herman Miller Inc., 1984 Intel Design '99 award for the CMF Design of the products Wood & Metal, Sfera Modulare and Metal & Metal, Bticino, 1999 IF Product Design Gold Award for Hitachi Enterprise Server EP8000 Series, Hitachi, 2007 IF Product Design Award 2011 for VSP – Virtual Storage Platform, Hitachi, 2011 Machine Design Award 2011 Grand Prize, Japan / Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry for VSP – Virtual Storage Platform, Hitachi, 2011

Publications Servizio di Corporate Image. Sistemi di identificazione (Red Books) Olivetti, Ivrea, 1971 Il Lingotto Primario Arcadia, Milan, 1985. Transitive Design, A Design Language for the Zeroes, Milan: Electa, 1999. Worldscape. The new domotic landscape, Milan: Nava, 2006 The Glamour System. Stephen Gundle, Clino Trini Castelli. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 Observatory on Interni n. 445–550, Milan: Mondadori, 1994–2005 No-form 2020 Corraini, 2019 Ali Salman Alighiero Boetti Forma, Milan, 2021