Ever fashionable, the Alessi brand has managed to transform from a metal utensil and dish designer to fully explore all kitchen and household options, incorporating the work of leading designers from Philippe Stark to Michael Graves and Aldo Rossi. Throughout its history Alessi has chosen direction based on the guidance of its designers and the development of the product itself. The brand vision appears to be to revel in design in all areas of life, to enjoy and celebrate the simplicity of everyday objects, and to take risks whether there exists a need for risk or not. Or put simply: No man should be forced to dine from a boring plate. 

  But how did Alessi acquire such a frivolously jubilant reputation? The year was 1921, the setting, a small town in the foothills of the Italian Alps, the founder Giovanni Alessi for whom the company is named was a metal expert working with a lathe to create workmanlike metal utensils and dishes. The result was a family-run brand that would continually adapt to set style in the kitchen and home using a variety of mediums from silver, bronze and stainless steel to porcelain, ceramic, and eventually, plastic. 

  Although Giovanni was an able craftsman, it wasn’t until his eldest son Carlo stepped up to the plate in the thirties and forties that the brand began to be associated with a style of design unique to the Alessi name. Carlo’s playfully flamboyant Bombe coffee and tea set is celebrated as creating a design sensibility in Italy that can still be seen as an influence in many of the products today. It was these early designs that encouraged ordinary Italians to view their kitchen as a living arthouse, where the salt and pepper shaker were more than just the functional sum of their parts. 

  Carlo’s eldest son Alberto continued along the path set by la famiglia and propelled the company into the international world of design. In the early nineties, on the advice of his designers, Alberto allowed the use of plastic to address a trend of “customers yearning for joyful, playful design,” as he put it. This change of direction for the brand, which prior to the advent of plastic, was becoming an clitist symbol of yuppie affluence, helped Alessi to break away from the harsh lines of the eighties and adjust to the more organic nineties. 

  And it is this advice from his designers that seems to inform Alberto’s approach to managing the brand’s direction. Rather than tracking the whims and desires of the market base, Alessi follows the suggestion of its designers in deciding where its next steps will be. This approach is a boon to designers who may wish to design free from the confines of the audience’s voice. In this manner the evolution of Alessi’s such that an elegant cup and saucer can reside next to a flamboyantly tentacled octopus whisk. 

  But for those aesthetes who worry that the brand is too accessible to the masses, Alessi has created a dual branding system to distinguish between its popular price point products and the more exclusive designs. There is the Alessi product, which is mass produced and easily accessed through department stores, and then a system of marks for designers dedicated to experimenting and manufactured in limited editions. These names include Officina Alessi, product designed solely in metal, Alessi Twergi, using only wood, and Alessi Tendentse, which uses porcelain and crystal glass. 

  Content for its products to be confined to the kitchen, the Alessi name in turn aspires to attain recognition within the design community. And the rest of the world obviously concurs as Alessi design can be found in museums throughout the world.

       Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago, is the land of the “midnight sun” with almost 24 hours of sunlight during the winter months. It is also home to one of the most important storage facilities in world farming—the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV). 

       The seed vault was opened in 2008 in an effort to safeguard the world's food supply for future generations. Svalbard is the perfect frozen environment to house seed samples, set inside an Arctic mountain at 130 meters above sea level, so it is unlikely to be flooded. Low humidity, geological stability, and the surrounding permafrost can keep seed deposits cool and dormant, dry, and viable for centuries. 

       Seed gene banks from around the world have sent food crop seeds as a fail-safe in case natural disaster or environmental damage destroys existing supplies. There are around one million seed samples from 80 institutes in the vault at present so there is a lot of spare capacity for the vegetables, grains, peas, beans, peppers, and legumes that are banked annually. On top of that, there are foraging grasses and rare flowers such as threatened orchid species from the Myanmar rain forests. 

       Seeds themselves are not kept for farmers or gardeners to grow produce. Their true value is as a genetic resource in plant  breeding to create new crop varieties. “Think of the seeds as a collection of traits, or even more broadly as a collection of options our crops will have in the future, options such as disease and pest resistance, drought and heat tolerance, better nutrition,” said SGSV founder Cary Fowler.

        Among those collections we need more seeds from wild varieties, the cousins of domesticated crops, say scientists. As extreme weather conditions such as higher temperatures or drought affect food crops, the resilient traits of wild plant species can be added to domesticated plants to improve their resistance to hostile conditions.

        Seed banks prefer open-pollinated and heirloom seeds. Open-pollinated plants have been pollinated naturally by insects, wind, birds or other means and are more genetically diverse and adapted to their environment. Heirloom varieties are those that have been passed down over generations among communities.

        There is criticism of the Svalbard facility in that it grants access to large corporations who could commercialize plant varieties from the planet's shared natural resources. Co-founder of the Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa, Kent Whealy, said that seed deposits placed in Svalbard are under the control of a United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization treaty that opens them up to corporate scientists. That potential weakness is also one of SGSV's greatest strengths—the availability to tap into plant traits and genetics that can ensure a healthy food supply. 

       What remains central to the work of seed banks and exchanges—where gardeners and farmers find or exchange seeds that they either want or have too many of—is supporting communities most affected by climate change, natural or man-made disasters. To grow plants in adverse conditions means keeping access to the planet's natural resources open, and that is what seed banks do best.