Sometimes, the design process takes on a rhythm so immersive, so persistent, that it blurs the lines between intention and instinct, labor and devotion. For those who dedicate themselves to making, this condition becomes less about production and more about a ritualized way of being, repeating gestures not just for function or form, but to inscribe meaning over time. The designed object can become a vessel of identity and memory and even a vehicle for transcendence.
I’m not sure how I first came across this image, but it perfectly captures the intersection of design and ritual. On February 16, 2016, in Omegna, Italy, a Moka pot containing Renato Bialetti’s ashes was placed at the altar of the church of Casale Corte Cerro. Just a few kilometers from the original factory, incense rose and the object that had defined his family’s legacy became his final resting place. The Moka, designed in 1933 by Alfonso Bialetti and made iconic by Renato’s commercial genius, transformed in that moment from the domestic into the sacred.
By choosing to rest inside the family's world-renowned coffee maker, Renato Bialetti blurred the boundary between body and object, soul and form, with a touch of irony. Although the Moka’s popularity is largely credited to Renato, its invention and design originated with his father, Alfonso, in 1933. Its materiality and iconic shape remain unchanged to this day.
The image evokes the intimate connection between Italian design, everyday ritual, and collective memory. It reminds me of my nonna Anna’s funeral. The closest family members gathered at her house and brought their own Moka pots, brewing four of them at the same time to welcome mourners with the scent of espresso. In many Italian homes, the Bialetti is more than just an object, verging on a family heirloom. A symbol of slowness, routine, and taste. An iconic design that birthed a whole category of coffee machines used daily around the world.
Renato Bialetti is not the only one who chose to merge his work with the eternal through an iconic branded object. After his 2008 death, Fredric J. Baur’s children honored their father’s wishes. On the way to his funeral, they stopped to buy a can of Pringles, with the aim of storing their father’s ashes in his greatest invention. One of his sons, Larry Baur, later said: “My siblings and I briefly debated what flavor to use, but I said, ‘Look, we need to use the original.’” So they did. Baur had not only invented the chip’s cylindrical packaging but had also developed the hyperbolic paraboloid shape that makes the chips uniquely stackable.
Gestures like placing ashes in a Moka pot or a Pringles can be seen as ritualized acts in the sense described by religious scholar Catherine Bell. In Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, she reframes ritual not as a fixed or sacred script, but as a strategic mode of action that organizes and interprets life through embodied, symbolic behavior. “Ritual is a strategic way of acting,” she writes, “that does not merely express cultural values or enact symbolic scripts but actually makes and remakes those values and scripts in the doing.” By introducing a Moka pot or a Pringles can into a funeral’s highly ritualized, religious proceedings, Bialetti and Baur redefined their products’ significance, transforming them from industrial products that provide everyday comfort into vessels suggestive of mortality itself. As Bell might argue, it is not just the object that carries meaning, but the act of ritualizing it, through repetition, context, and symbolic framing, that produces a sense of permanence and legacy.
Bialetti’s and Baur’s final decisions speak to a powerful truth about makers and inventors, that some projects are not just professional milestones but come to sit at the center of their physical and spiritual lives. Although I don’t think I want to be so wholly enmeshed with a physical object or infrastructure at the end of my life, I take these stories as reminders of devotion and passion. They highlight how objects can transcend their utilitarian origins and become vessels of memory and identity, even offering a strange sort of permanence. In that sense, design itself can resemble a form of ritual practice, a way of shaping the material world and engaging with what will outlive us. Perhaps it’s not the object itself that becomes eternal, but the way we choose to perform around it. Can design be a path to salvation, or at least, to significance?
Matteo Guarnaccia is a Sicilian freelance art director and designer based in Europe. He is the author of Cross Cultural Chairs: 8 Chairs from 8 Countries; Diversifying Modern Seating.
Related Stories
