What is the meaning of experience?
Here we are at the last stage of our journey across the FUTURE protocol: Experience. Defined as the “direct knowledge of a specific sphere of reality, personally acquired through observation, use or practice” (source: the Italian encyclopaedia Treccani), experience for us is related to the world of the chair. But let’s find out more in detail what experience really means to us.
How can we get experience?
By learning! Experience cannot be separated from education, both given and acquired. We never stop learning as we never stop teaching. Experience is learned through education and is transmitted in the same way.
How many of us would like to know everything. How many expect infinite skills from others in order not to spend time explaining a procedure, a concept, a task. But let us remember, however, that there is no experience without education and there is also no education without experience.
The key is to learn not only through books, but also by looking with your own eyes, experimenting with your own hands, making mistakes and above all sharing.
Education as an experience
In our last article we presented the initiative “RefittiaMo la scuola”. The reason why we chose to “refit” the schools lies precisely in the education. Because we believe that education is the starting point for making a change.
We would like to bring you the example of JA Italia Junior Achievement, a non-profit organisation dedicated to economic and entrepreneurial education in schools. By sharing entrepreneurial experiences in schools, it promotes a new approach to education and training for young people.
Our CEO Lorenzo Braida is among the entrepreneurs who work side by side with teachers by providing experience, competence and passion and by supporting the students in the creation of mini-businesses.
Training through the sharing of knowledge and values that move us, stimulating curiosity and mutual exchange, represents an opportunity to build your own experience. This is the only way for education to become experience and for experience to become training.
Experience as training
Even if we are trained and experienced in the field of chairs, there are always variants that can escape from our control and that can only be learned from direct experience, especially if they are related to the cultural aspects of a country.
The information we have collected over the years has made us understand how important it is to pay attention to the cultural factor when approaching foreign markets, both from the point of view of design and attention to details.
For example, knowing that Arab countries prefer sophisticated design and gold or polished wood finishes, while Nordic countries love simple design and natural finishes, are fundamental indicators for choosing which direction to follow in a given project.
Perhaps, this aspect seems obvious to you, but in the beginning it was not like that for us. To make you understand better, we are going to share with you a little anecdote that happened to us some time ago.
We sent some chair samples made with a white fabric to Japan, because the customer asked us to choose a fabric from our warehouse. Upon receipt of the samples, his reaction surprised us: “The chairs are beautiful, but the white colour is associated with mourning here in Japan…”
Experience sharing
In order to train ourselves, we can choose two ways: first to acknowledge and then to gain experience or the opposite. The important thing is that in order to deeply understand something, we need to acknowledge and experience it, but we also need to share it with others.
Sharing with others opens the doors to exchange and interaction, from which you never stop learning. Whether it is for a new project to be carried out or for a particular modification to be made to a chair, these continuous stimuli push us to look for more and for better things.
This is the secret of experience: sharing. When getting an order, we aim not only to make our customer happy, but also to become carriers of identity. Of the identity that we have shared with you during these six articles and to which we have given the name of FUTURE.
Focus, Unique, Translate, Use it, Refitting and Experience. These are the words we chose in order to tell you who we are.
We will talk about our experience on Saturday June 11th, at the Fuorisalone, during the event “Hotel Regeneration Hybrid Restaurant” by Simone Micheli. In fact, at 12 am, our CEO Lorenzo Braida will personally show you our FUTURE protocol and the new seating models created according to these principles.
