After graduating from a BA in Product Design, Riccardo Cenedella started to work in an art-design studio where he learnt the craft of hand-made furniture; “I enjoyed the process, the feeling of dust on my hands and being able to say, ‘I made this!’” Riccardo grew up in a small city near the industrial Turin, where he would see large amounts of industrial waste abandoned in the courtyard of local factories. As a maker with a sustainable ethos, Riccardo saw design as a tool to create awareness about overconsumption and waste production. Process and narrative came first and the form followed. He enrolled in MA Material Futures at Central Saint Martins and decided to set the limit of his practice to the use of waste materials as his primary resource. His work now explores the ways in which we can transform thrown away material into functional objects and is particularly influenced by Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione, which advocated for small scale and on-demand production with simple, yet functional, form.
Basing his own studio in East London after completing his Masters, some of his very recent projects include Carpet Matter, a collection of furniture made using carpet waste as the primary resource, while Alimenta uses Riccardo’s food waste produced during lockdown to experiment with ad-hoc materials to create household objects such as pots and vases. His Urban Waste Project used household waste collected in the streets of Riccardo’s East London neighborhood to create new, functional products such as speakers in order to demonstrate the potential in our bins.