End of the project lockdown

The Design Week 2022 is above all a event collective, participated, international. And this is already good news. The tired and happy faces of the people of design wander around tropical Milan without fear. Audacity and enthusiasm have taken the place of the reflective and cautious atmosphere of the Supersalone.

There is no intimate search for lockdowns, the cosmic pessimism of forced solitude. Companies have opened fewer archives and, if they have done so, it is to retrace a project that has set fire to the dust of Italian design.

Experimenting with history…

The limited edition of the Arco K 2022 for the sixtieth anniversary of the lamp by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni explores the possibilities of today's materials and technologies. The crystal base replaces the marble: the Arco by Flos finds a new lightness in an almost invisible material. As befits a contemporary project.

And again: a new decentralized location (at Fabbrica Orobia, a beautiful space not far from Fondazione Prada) to tell a catalog that, according to Flos, does not it distinguishes more between architecture and interior design but instead solves functions of indoor/outdoor, private/collective living.

…and with the DNA of design

The re-edition of iGuzzini of the portable lamp Polsino by Gio Ponti has different reasons, but equally experimental and courageous. The brand gives itself as its theme Re-Future to relaunch its expertise in technical lighting with a high rate of technical and technological invention. But look to your origins to find out which pieces of research and which design paths we are losing along the way.

Happy intuitions that today have a different meaning, to be retraced to see if, with technology, we cannot recover projects and ideas that we believed outdated. Polsino is a hyper contemporary object for compositional simplicity, attention to decorative detail (the connecting screw), functions.

A déjà vu flavor, but sensible and constructive, also for the research on inflatable and on air as the main construction material (those who do not remember this kind of research raise your hand).

This is the theme of the work exhibited at Alcova by a group of students from the Muthesius Kunsthochschule of Kiel. And also the collection of Markus Benesch Show your colors retraces known processes (recovery, maker attitude, color as in the seventies) to identify a path in which scarcity is opportunity and not impotence.

Symposia, conversations, talks: the word superstition

Doing research, closed in one's own individual path, no longer makes sense. The exchange of knowledge and the invitation to reflection and perhaps controversial exchange is urgent. Formafantasma and Prada come together in Frames, On forest, a three-day symposium with an enviable parterre of researchers in design, technology and science. From Anna Tsing who studies the spontaneous and global microeconomies of a gourmet mushroom, to Paola Antonelli who has been reflecting on emergency design for some time.

Then there is the Tomorrow's Living research on display at Maria Grazia Mattei's MEET launched by Huawei Aesthetic Research Center and curated by Robert Thiemann. The result was a four-part docu-series in which thirty international professionals (also designers, architects, scientists) explain how design and technology improve and improve living. Conversations as superstitious rituals to talk again about the future without fear.

The nature / city laboratory

Finally, nature is another huge experimentation ground. Flowers, plants, vegetation in every urban interstice. Hydroponic crops in home kitchens. Personal cultivation of fresh vegetables in new generation refrigerators. A nature to tame, to urbanize.

But also to be left free to transform urban spaces and to be treated with respectful wonder, as happens in the Alcova location where in fact the vegetation is a real ingredient of the scenography. And nature that enters homes in sound form (ASMR Instruments, Yamaha Sound Machine) or in the form of pattern visual ( Pebble Rubble by Front Design for Moroso+Kvadrat).