Pirelli offers students placements in Annual Report communications project

Pirelli has launched a communication project for undergraduate, postgraduate and recently graduated students, offering the chance of a two-month paid work placement in Milan, in addition to publication in the manufacturer’s 2012 Annual Report alongside artwork by New Yorker cartoonist, Liza Donnelly. The brief presented by Pirelli is simple: find the most significant word that sums up the values students would like to matter most in their future. Pirelli will send the submissions, accompanied by the students’ explanations of their choices, to a jury in order to select the 10 most representative words. These 10 words, and the accompanying reflections, will then be interpreted by Donnelly, and printed in the 2012 Report.

The 10 students supplying the most apposite words will receive two months’ paid work experience at Pirelli’s Milan headquarters, which include the group’s main R&D centre, the Pirelli Foundation, which gathers and distributes the company’s historic and cultural legacy, and the Hangar Bicocca, a space dedicated to the production, exhibition and promotion of contemporary art.

The jury of luminaries that will select the winning words is composed of: Bina Agarwal, professor of Economics at the University of Manchester and president of the International Society for Ecological Economics; Thomas Goetz, writer of scientific tracts and long-time director of the magazine Wired; Steve McCurry, photo-journalist and author of the 2013 edition of the Pirelli Calendar; Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Giuseppe Tornatore, film director, producer and screenplay writer; and Sebastian Vettel, Formula One driver and three times world champion.

Pirelli has previously used the occasion of its Annual Report to provide a narrative alongside the financial and industrial information. In 2011 the young Dutch designer Stefan Glerum collaborated on the 2011 edition alongside texts by H. M. Enzensberger, Guillermo Martinez, W. L. Heat-Moon and Javier Cercas. Pirelli says it provides a “space of reflection based on the stimuli that are already arriving from young entrants. “Empathy”, “Loyalty”, “Creativity”, “Diversity”, “Humility”, “Courage”, “Imagination” are a few of the hundreds of proposals so far sent in, and which offer an original glimpse, in an unexpected place like an annual report, of how youth looks to the future.

The “Imagining the Future with… You” project is supported by the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh in the UK, as well as many more around the world, detailed on Pirelli’s website. The microsite holding the competition details, including the first four selections, can be found at http://www.pirelli.com/corporate/en/careers/imagining-the-future/default.html, while Pirelli is also running the project through its Facebook page. The microsite includes an application into which students can insert the word that represents their vision of the future and a text of up to 140 words explaining the choice. Four submissions have already been selected for review by the jury, and they are available now to read on Pirelli’s website.

Related news:

Pirelli introduces designer, App-enabled Annual Report