The kitchen of the inventor of the Swiffer is immaculate. Not just the floor but every surface is spotless and carefully organized. There’s art on the walls and a series of backlit translucent white cabinets. A modernist aluminum light fixture hangs over the kitchen table and the chairs are clear Lucite.
“Yes, I’m a clean person,” said Gianfranco Zaccai over lunch at his home off Chestnut Street. But it wasn’t the neat-freak in Zaccai that led to a product line for Procter & Gamble that brings in an estimated $500 million per year: It was the designer.
Born in eastern Italy and raised in Syracuse, N.Y., Zaccai became one of the world’s most prominent industrial designers, eventually co-creating and overseeing The Design Continuum, a firm that employed 250 designers and scientists around the globe and helped companies think through the usability, look and feel, maintenance and manufacture of products of all kinds, from intricate medical devices to the Reebok Pump, which helped the Canton-based sports gear company fend off the marketing tsunami that was Nike in the 1990s.
“The Design Continuum was a name that I borrowed from a book that I got out of the Instrumentation Laboratory [a company he’d worked for] library,” said Zaccai. “I still have the book. I never returned it.” The firm’s name, however, did not last as long. As its scope expanded, it was renamed Continuum Innovation.
Zaccai’s Needham home (he has another in Venice, along with more properties in Italy) reflects the eclectic mind that allows someone to create vastly different kinds of projects, related only by a high standard. It was originally built as a farmhouse, and Zaccai is only the latest owner to add on and reconfigure. Now its rambling first floor includes a small, enclosed courtyard. The living room has been extended out past the original back of the home, leaving the second floor hanging, or rather, supported by girders and pillars. The back wall of that section is all glass, two stories high, looking out over a terraced garden. On one side of the house is a room that mystifies and delights the owner: a full-length, two-story library with wooden shelving, hefty wood ceiling beams and a large fireplace. “I think this room must have been brought here from another building,” said Zaccai, “But I haven’t been able to find its history.”
Zaccai moved to his unusual house to accommodate an unusual household. He and his then-wife had two adopted children from eastern Europe, each of whom proved to be challenged by mental health and intellectual disabilities. As they raised the children, they became close friends with another family and essentially co-parented. When the Zaccais’ marriage ended in 2009, Gianfranco looked for a house he and his children could share with this family of five and a community with good support for children with special needs.
Those needs have become the centerpiece of Zaccai’s retirement. After selling his design firm in 2017, he started a foundation, named Intelligence++, which promotes efforts to solve problems for neurodivergent people. He encourages the observational, open-ended approaches he developed in his design career, including learning from the people who used the products rather than the people who supervised those who used them. He recounted a time he’d met with a leading doctor in Japan about the use of a device for measuring blood gases. The doctor described the protocol for use of the device. After the doctor left the room, a technician said to Zaccai, “Now, let me tell you what really happens.”
“Over all these years from the time I adopted Michela and Giselle,” said Zaccai, “I was navigating a space I didn’t understand. And I was trusting the [kinds of] experts that I didn’t trust in the projects we were engaged in. And along the way, I realized that I didn’t know what the right kind of guidance was.”
Instead of seeing the areas where his (now adult) children are wanting, Zaccai focuses on all the things they do well.
“I have discovered that Michela had all these talents that were not captured by the IQ testing,” he said. “She volunteered at an Alzheimer’s facility. So she had a high degree of emotional intelligence. Yep. She had musical talent — she could carry a tune.” And, he said with self-deprecating pride, she was able to solve her own tech problems, patiently spending whatever time it took on the line with Apple or Microsoft technicians. “I wouldn’t have the patience to be on hold for 45 minutes,” Zaccai said.
Adopting children from eastern Europe fit with Zaccai’s own background. His parents had escaped the growing Soviet movement after World War II, part of the Istrian-Dalmatian migration of people from the regions that now include Croatia and Slovenia. They first moved to Trieste, which had been annexed into Italy. Zaccai was born there in 1947. He had two older sisters with whom he remains close.
In 1956, they moved again. “My parents emigrated to the United States because they were afraid of another world war. My parents were older; they had both lived through the first and the second world wars. They immigrated to the U.S. in 1956, when Russia exploded a nuclear weapon. They were afraid of what might happen.
“I was 9 years old when I came here. We landed in New York. I remember being totally disappointed. I was expecting cowboys and Indians and I didn’t see any.” The family settled in Syracuse, where one of Zaccai’s aunts was living.
Zaccai would go on to study industrial design at Syracuse University. After graduating, he took advantage of being bilingual and got a job with a medical device company that had facilities in Lexington and in Milan. The work there — and much of Zaccai’s later work — required deep scientific as well as technical design knowledge, and he began to partner with people he’d go on to work with for years. Zaccai’s descriptions of the products they improved — such as a blood coagulation analyzer and a flame photometer to measure sodium, potassium and lithium in the blood — make his famous consumer products, the Swiffer and the Reebok Pump, look trivial.
Years later, Zaccai would help design another medical device, an improvement on early insulin pumps, that would directly change the lives of millions of people, particularly children with diabetes. The project was initiated by three people from the insulin manufacturing world who were certain there was a better way to deliver the vital drug.
“We asked why type one diabetics, who were typically children, weren’t wearing an insulin pump. And they said doctors don’t prescribe it for children because there’s a high incidence of infections.” The existing design included a pump-box that users wore on their belts and a tube that led under their clothing to a needle in the abdomen. “Well, we realized pretty quickly that when children who had an insulin pump played, this plastic line would get snagged and it would lift up the patch on the abdomen. So dirt would get inside and they would get an infection.”
The answer was a device that could be worn under clothing and did not include a supply line. The core technology, Zaccai said, was a pump that could deliver insulin with a minimal use of power, so both the pump and the batteries could be much smaller. And the three founders who had approached Zaccai with a vision but few resources (“they weren’t a company, they were just three guys”) launched Insulet, which is now a leader in the insulin and drug-delivery arena with $649 million in sales last year.
As for the Swiffer? Procter & Gamble hired Zaccai’s firm with an open-ended directive: imagine a product that would create a new, large revenue stream for the household product conglomerate. “We looked at all aspects of cleaning,” said Gianfranco. “We went to people’s homes. And one thing we found was that when people mopped, they spent more time filling and cleaning the bucket and the mop than they did mopping.” They also noticed that when a mopped floor dried, there was still a film of dirt. His team analyzed the dirt and discovered it was primarily dust, which mopping had turned to mud.
“So we came back with the insight that we needed to eliminate the water and the detergent, and that the best way to remove dust is through electrostatic action. And we could do that with a single sheet of something that was treated in such a way that it would clean a large surface area just by rubbing on the floor. It would create electrostatic attraction and attract the dust.” (Which, by the way, he said, is mostly tiny bits of skin sloughed off by humans and pets.)
For Procter & Gamble, it was the perfect product: Easy to use, effective, and one that required ongoing purchases of one-time use wipes. For Zaccai, it was a consumer-product hit which opened business doors for years.
One might retire from running a design firm, but apparently never from design. Making coffee after a long lunch and conversation, Zacchai showed off a device that used a teabag-style pouch of coffee rather than the familiar (and wasteful) plastic and foil pods that most one-cup makers use. “They’ve discontinued this,” he said with a rueful look. “I have to special order the coffee pouches. Sometimes the best designs don’t win in the market.”
Editor’s note: Gianfranco Zaccai has hosted an event for The Observer at his home.
Save as PDF