Italy – On day three of Milan Design Week, The Future Laboratory explored the sought-after Brera Design District – housing everything from hyperphysical flagship stores to interactive showrooms and university exhibitions.
In line with tradition, Fuorisalone made space for the designers of tomorrow by highlighting graduates’ creativity in various exhibitions. Students from Swiss university ÉCAL’s BA in Industrial Design turned junkyard items into innovative furnishings from junkyard items. Their counterparts doing their master’s in product design developed new prototypes of wind turbines for Fogo Island, an offshore destination known for its strong gales. Students Yohanna Rieckhoff and Luis Rodriguez’s turbine doubled up as a seaweed farm, proposing a solution to Fogo Island’s vanishing marine trade. Jule Bols and Sophia Götz presented a turbine that stored a hydroponic greenhouse, a space that would facilitate year-round food production.
Sweden’s Lund University School of Industrial Design (LUSID) presented Liminal Spaces, an exploration of sensor technology in collaboration with Sigma Connectivity. Visitors could see how the movement of pendulums and a person’s heartbeat could create personalised artwork via one of the installations. Others addressed how self-powered thermoelectricity could be used for children’s lamps or how interactive mirrors could be tomorrow’s sign language teachers.
The Brera Design District is also known for hosting big names. Timberland, best known for its working boot, is celebrating its 50th anniversary in the Triennale Milano Museum of Art and Design as part of Milan Design Week 2023. Future73 Visions presented six iterations of the famous boot designed in collaboration with creatives such as Christopher Raeburn and Suzanne Oude Hengel. The latter also developed an accompanying film powered by artificial intelligence that combined existing Timberland advertising, its archival imagery and her knitting techniques.
Elsewhere, world-renowned architecture firm Carlo Ratti Associati partnered with Italo Rota to create a living board game that prompted visitors to question their urban mobility choices. Guests were guided around the board to rethink their travel methods and routes.
Strategic opportunity
Much like Carlo Ratti Associati’s life-size exhibition, live experiences that require participation and action from people are a useful tool for encouraging new behaviours