La Fondazione Claudio Buziol was host to XYZ, the graphic design portion of a three part mash up, where students from different Venice design schools competed by making “a boring” assignment more exciting. The competing groups represented the design studios Tankboys and Oxstudio. The participants had from 9 am to 5 pm to conceive ideas for such products and services as a 50 percent sale at a shoe store, a Pecarino cheese festival, a business card for a house painter, a logo for seamstress, and more. Each participant presented their solutions to a jury, including Lita Talarico and Steve Heller. The results were mixed, but the winner was brilliant — the poster for the shoe sale: a free left shoe with every right shoe sold.

Here’s more about the program:
XYZ
A multidisciplinary exhibition space for the applied arts

XYZ is a multiple exhibition space, dedicated to various expressive forms of the applied arts, from the design of visual objects to utilitarian ones, according to three conceptual Cartesian axes, which are coordinated but not exclusive: graphic X, design Y and photography Z.

Spazio XYZ is a small gallery located in Treviso (near Venice in Italy), and also a non-profit association that promotes a positive approach to the world of artefacts
The initiative is the result of a need to find common ground for all expressive forms that involves our behavior and our daily visual panorama more closely, but which are rarely given the space for an organic exhibition in art galleries. Each exhibition, organised according to one of the three ideal conceptual axes, represents an attempt to pause the continual, chaotic flow of communication, to extract an object, an image or a representation that is worth a more in-depth look. The rotation of events and the whole curatorial project of the space (which also includes a mini-bookshop that is updated with each exhibition) represents a way of constructing, studying and sharing an on-going dialogue on the state, evolution and origins of our visual-design culture.
www.spazioxyz.org