Design and Neuroscience: Caimi Brevetti's New Challenge

Doing business - and designing - only makes sense if the final goal is to innovate and create something useful for society, something that didn't exist before. This is the lesson that Renato Caimi passed on to his sons Gianni, Renzo, Franco and Giorgio, who took the reins of the company he founded in 1949 together with his brother Mario, Caimi Pentolux (later Caimi Brevetti) in Nova Milanese. A small industrial company that embodies all the characteristic elements of the Italian furniture-design industry: family management, a small size (around 17 million euros in turnover in 2024), strong roots in its territory and a vocation to innovate that aims to always raise the bar a little higher and does not skimp on investments, even in difficult times.

Thus, after having shifted the company's focus towards research on sound-absorbing materials applied to furniture, the Brianza-based company created - in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic - the OpenLab, seven futuristic laboratories dedicated to research in the acoustic field, new materials and prototyping. A 1,200 m2 structure that required, at the time, approximately 3 million euros of investments, two years of technical studies and works, 40 kilometers of electrical cables and data cables and cutting-edge technological equipment.

A place to carry out studies and experiments useful to the company to develop its products, but also to do pure research, at the service of the territory and science, in collaboration with universities, research institutes and medicine, to study the effects that sound has on the psyche and body of people. "For about half the time, the laboratories are used, free of charge, by scientific and educational institutions, culture and art, with the only stipulation that the research carried out in the OpenLab has social and not commercial purposes, therefore with possible repercussions on the community", explains the CEO, Franco Caimi.

In these approximately five years of activity (net of the restrictions initially imposed by Covid) OpenLab has collaborated with dozens of entities, from the Polytechnic of Milan to the Brera Academy, from the Bicocca University to the IED of Milan, but also with hospitals and research institutions, such as the Policlinico of Milan or the Veronesi Foundation. «All the projects carried out have to do with the medical field or with design - Franco Caimi specifies - and they are all programs that require time, starting from the feasibility analyses to understand the objectives to be achieved and which instruments to use, up to the implementation». Because research and innovation require a long horizon and the possibility of making mistakes, of adjusting the aim, of redefining the objectives.

"This is why, at the beginning, we felt the need to create these laboratories in-house - explains the entrepreneur -. The instruments themselves, as innovative as they are, also exist elsewhere, but there are few places in Europe, perhaps none, where we can have them all available together. Having them in-house and our property means being able to conduct all the studies and experiments we want, when we want and for as long as we want". This has allowed the company to implement very innovative projects in recent years, such as sound-absorbing fabrics and A+E technology to reduce the impact of electromagnetic waves, which otherwise would have required very high costs and very long times".