Carmen Baselga studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Valencia, completing her training at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Salamanca and at the School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Her activity as a designer is really varied: she has created housing, offices, commercial premises, restaurants, terraces, ephemeral spaces and scenography.

Throughout her career, from her studio, she has carried out projects for important firms such as Grohe and Electrolux, as well as for the prestigious chef Paco Roncero. With this impressive trajectory in the world of design, he has also created stands for Lladró at the most important design fairs in the world.

Over the course of your career, you have created branding experiences including booths for Lladró at world-leading design fairs. How do you address the challenge of materializing the universe of a brand like Lladró in a temporary sensorial space able to connect with people from all over the world?

When you strip things down to their essence, you become more universal and it is easier to reach people, wherever they are from. For us it was vitally important first of all to understand the processes involved, visiting the factory and observing, talking with people from the various departments, besides marketing of course, which is obviously the one that sets the overall guidelines for the project. And so, we gradually soaked up the essence I mentioned earlier, which I believe can be seen in its products.

It is important to take sensorial qualities to their highest expression when it comes to creating an atmosphere in which the product is able to express itself, And, in order to achieve this aim, we also rely on new technologies. That being said, we always ensure that we use them discreetly, never in an invasive way because the focal point must be the object, the piece or set of pieces, and above all the concept, which was the core focus of the boutique in NYC, where we created a series of different scenarios to reflect the diversity of the brand itself.

As a studio you keep abreast of latest advances like 3D printing and user experiences that break the static relationship between consumer and product. Can you tell us what this revolution means for design? What is the greatest challenge your profession is facing today?

New technologies are a great help in creating spaces. They allow you to take on more radical or complex ideas and improve the user experience, producing public interaction or participation in offline spaces. But first you have to stimulate people to go to these places.

The greatest challenge we face today is how to compete with the saturation of images calling for our attention, generated digitally or not, circulating on social media, which are just pure visual appearance and yet keep people trapped in the digital world. To be honest, more than a challenge facing our profession, it is something that affects society as a whole. You have to bring people back to the physical space, where the experience is complete and they can participate with all their senses. For me personally, the most essential of all the senses is touch, and this is not possible on internet; we can feel the temperature, pressure, vibrations, the texture of an object, and that allows us to create an emotional connection with our surroundings and with other people.

What is most important to you about the spaces and objects around us?

Objects represent us, they talk about us and our experiences, they are repositories of memory. They can make us dream, imagine, transport us to other places or times, almost like taking a journey. And the experience of space is also recorded in our memory, certain paths, or how the light filters through at a certain moment, which is why the spatial project and the integration of all its elements is so important.

Are sustainability and exclusiveness compatible when it comes to design?

Yes, of course, to the extent that we are better able to customize, which confers greater exclusiveness. When you work to order, even if only partially, it means you don’t need to have stocks or just basic stocks. That means less costs in logistics and transport, and in turn a smaller carbon footprint.

Reusing, or recycling, is another key. For instance, in our case, in one of the projects we repurposed old molds no longer in use with a constructive sense, giving them what we now call a second life, but at the same time it has also allowed us to underscore the delicate and complex process involved in making Lladró works, as well as showing its backstory.

What do you believe is the role of design today in the mission to protect and develop handcrafts?

I believe that design plays a key role in saving the future of crafts. Ancestral craft techniques are kept alive by certain communities around the world and it would be a great pity if they were lost. Some of them are just barely surviving. The secret is to combine the know-how of crafts with the open mind of the designer, which helps us to change typologies with contemporary criteria, opening them up to new markets and giving crafts all the vibrancy and the recognition they deserve.