This Design Week 2023 has just ended: it's time to attempt a synthesis on the directions taken by the project

“Aesthetics is a function”. I quote Francesco Pace (aka Tellurico), who in turn quotes the sociologist Bruno Latour.

We meet at Take care! Of your mind, body and environment, the exhibition that he curated for Isola Design District at Stecca03. A small collection of projects around the theme of 'taking care' that require an in-depth visit, listening to explanations.

Warning: not narration, but a leap into the meta-project or, to be clearer, in the sense and context in which the projects are born.

Aesthetics is a function

Therefore: aesthetics is a function. Surrounding ourselves with sensibly beautiful things, artistic or creative experiences, is an act of care for oneself and for others.

Not only Latour and Tellurico say it, but also a relatively recent discipline such as neuroaesthetics which, scientific data in hand, explains why frequenting and using beauty lengthens life.

Given this, perhaps it is more correct to ask where is the human species going, of which design is certainly an excellent material synthesis.

On the road, again

We started moving again. That's no small matter: after a long period of cautious and poor mobility, the streets are crowded, designers plan a lot and companies invest in new products and in an impressive number of events.

It was like this even before the pandemic, so much so that the FuoriSalone system began to wonder how to manage and rationalize flows.

But now there is a different energy: the hunger for meetings and aesthetic exercises has reached a peak.

It is not the 2019 FuoriSalone, it is a hunt for experience, for encounters, for the production of thought. Now there is only one problem: slowing down.

On the road, again

We started moving again. That's no small matter: after a long period of cautious and poor mobility, the streets are crowded, designers plan a lot and companies invest in new products and in an impressive number of events.

It was like this even before the pandemic, so much so that the FuoriSalone system began to wonder how to manage and rationalize flows.

But now there is a different energy: the hunger for meetings and aesthetic exercises has reached a peak.

It is not the 2019 FuoriSalone, it is a hunt for experience, for encounters, for the production of thought. Now there is only one problem: slowing down.

The common thread of historical design

More memory, treated like a treasure, at the Cassina Echoes: 50 years of I Maestri exhibition, curated by Patricia Urquiola and Federica Sala .

At Palazzo Broggi in a disused vault, a masterfully told story of design, a red and underground path that leads to the physical place of memory.

The shells, the structures, the components, the prototypes and the unique pieces resting on the remains of an archaeological space that says that things pass, but remain.

Remembrance is a cultural exercise

Memory has an important function and, in fact, no one talks about revolution, about making a clean slate to rebuild. It's a fluid move forward but, at the cost of being repetitive, different.

The great return of Ingo Maurer to the toll booths of Porta Nuova is a significant and, in a certain sense, historic experience.

A brand that seemed to be made by a man instead demonstrates that shared design thinking works in the name of poetry, of minimal and ironic intervention, of technology used for definitively human purposes.

The external layout of the toll booths is beautiful, impeccable, made of little: natural light and artificial light, a reflecting open-air ceiling, moved by the wind, changeable like the brightness in the transition from day to night.

And if someone was expecting nostalgia, no luck: Ingo Maurer goes ahead, presents new lamps (beautiful as always) and declares that the cultural heritage is stronger than the individual.

Beauty is also fear

In summary: design goes where we go. He follows us and anticipates us, with a measured intelligence, linked to production, to material culture. And to beauty, which for the Greeks was also terror.

Anniina Koivu has launched a reconnaissance on the objects needed to survive. Nothing romantic: here we are in the realm of Survivalists, a widespread and underground movement of Preppers: those who are ready to face collapse.

An old and new theme, ranging from clever anonymous design tools to technology, from the work of designers on survival kits to technical production.

The Prepper's Pantry, the pantry of the survivalist, is a distressing warning but also a great awareness of human fallibility and frailty.

The crisis as no one has ever told it, to shake not souls but a healthy instinct for life by returning to basic needs: eating, drinking, orienting, communicating.