Milan design week report 2017

© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA
MILAN DESIGN WEEK
Report 2017
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA “Open Future” Open Design School, Matera 2019 at Palazzo Clerici. Photo credit: Design Group Italia

© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA Report / Milan Design Week 2017
Index
00/ Milan Design Week / The event
Design week and the social media
Salone del Mobile 2017
Designer/Artist
Design criticism
God
Capitalism is over
DAE #TVClerici
01/ Trends in colour harmony
Private colors
Solid and oxide colors
Neutral but natural
La vie en rose
02/ Trends in materials and textures
Material fluidity
Liquid Mood
Glass in Motion
Concrete Waving
Trans-matter
Crude Essence
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA Report / Milan Design Week 2017

© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA Report / Milan Design Week 2017© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA Illustration by Ilaria Angelini for Design Group Italia, 2017
Milan Design Week / The event
Over the last few years, Milan Design Week has grown from a mere furniture
fair into a lot more interesting phenomenon.
While it has kept its position as a steady fixture in any design professional’s
calendar, the event now attracts a crowd that reaches far beyond our industry.
Milan Design Week has growing cultural importance as the most important
annual destination for design tourism in the world.
This creates access to major international visibility, and new aspects of the
design industry are increasingly taking the spotlight.
The attention is shifting from product novelties to the entire paths and lifecycles
of the products, from the first idea, through production all the way to their end
use and beyond.
Brands are using the design week as something more than a producer fair.
Instead of only rolling out their latest collections, they are showing their values
and people, who they are and what they stand for.
This year’s Milan Design Week invited everyone to reflect on and debate the
role of design. This was done by designers, companies, artists and universities
through mediums varying from installations, performances and theatre.
Indeed, the week-long 'show' is perhaps turning into a 'talk show'
that makes us think and invites us to join the dialogue, which
will continue until the next episode is due to air in April 2018.

Design week and the social media
I was there, I can tell you the story
Social media played a more important role than ever before.
Attending the Milan Design Week is mandatory for everyone who wants
to be up-to-date on the future of design. Communicating that you did so
is equally essential.
In the age of social media, we leave fresh traces of our movements in the
form of photos and videos. How many of us toured around the stands,
events and installations with our eyes glued to our phones?
00 / Milan Design Week / The event
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA “Intricato” Design Foundation Istanbul at Triennale Milan. Photo credit: Design Group Italia

Salone del Mobile 2017
From a design supermarket to a private home
This year’s furniture fair confirmed its transformation from a design
supermarket to a cosy private home, where you have the privilege of
being invited to and enjoy the beautiful and the new.
No longer just about objects, pieces of furniture or products, this year’s
Milan Design Week offered its visitors an intense and varied experience
in the world of living.
Every stand of the show, every showroom and venue in the city was a
wise construction of possible scenarios: furniture, accessories,
architectures, textiles, colors, lights, details. Worlds that tell styles and
identity of inspiration, worlds where to capture the meaning of the new
that is coming.
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA Mazzoleni Art and DIMORESTUDIO. Photo credit: Paola Pansini

Designer / Artist
Form follows fame
For seven days, design objects are allowed to forget about their original
raison d’etre and step on to the main stage where art and design are
mixed for a new kind of experience.
More than products for sale, instead they are the protagonists of
installations and exhibits; performances as exciting as they are
ephemeral.
Artists and designers measure up against each other, both aiming to
leave the visitor with memories, one more vivid and magical than the
other, while at the same time inspiring that sense of suspended time, a
promise to see you again next season. The shows are a little like episodes
of a television series that leave us wanting to know more, to know how
the story unfolds.
The stars of the show are the artist-designers, while the brands
supporting the operation become quality guarantees.
Nendo, Yoshioka, Lee Broom, Tom Dixon, Lexus, Panasonic… we look
forward to the next episode. Watch out for spoilers!
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA “Time machine” Lee Broom. Photo credit: Design Group Italia

Design criticism
A small new beginning
In 1968, the student revolution gave rise to a deep change in social
thinking in the West. Italian design was introduced to the world in 1972
through an exhibition at MoMa in New York. The exhibition ”Italian: the
new domestic landscape” presented a vision of domestic reality as a
venue for both social and aesthetic experimentation. It highlighted the
visionary quality of design and its ability to imagine new scenarios –
through the pioneering use of technology among others.
This year, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the legendary year
1968, the social role of design has surfaced as a leading topic in design
discussion again. In the 1970s, the desire to improve the future with
design was stronger than the severe and implicit criticism of
contemporary society. There might not be the same stance behind the
efforts to change the future but just stopping for a moment to discuss
and reconsider is already a step to the right direction, a small new
beginning.
Critical to the current situation, shows such as God, Capitalism is over
and Atelier Clerici prompt the public to become aware of
the mechanisms of the design market.
TV Clerici
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA “#TVClerici” Design Academy di Eindhoven at Palazzo Clerici. Photo credit: Design Group Italia

Design criticism
God
curated by Maria Cristina Didero, Atelier Biagetti
The three instalments, cult of the body, sex and God, curated by Maria
Cristina Didero at Atelier Biagetti reflect on issues that correspond to so
many obsessions of contemporary culture. Each was designed as a place
where the viewer is involved through the emotions and the senses and
built up a scene, devised as a film set, which surprises and enchants: true
decompression chambers for our experience of everyday life, both real
and virtual.
Read more here
http://atelierbiagetti.com/it/portfolio_page/god/
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA “GOD” Atelier Biagetti. Photo credit: Delfino Sisto Legnani. Courtesy of Atelier Biagetti

Design criticism
Capitalism is over
a project by Raumplan and Cascina Cuccagna
Capitalism is over by Raumplan and Cascina Cuccagna was both a parody
and a historical reflection on the contradictions, the critical issues and
opportunities that characterize the new economic and tech cycle. A
farewell party with iconic products of the golden age of industrial
capitalism, and with their contemporary successors, sons of the crisis and
new business models.
Read more here
http://capitalismisover.it/index.html
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA “Capitalism is over” a project by Raumplan and Cascina Cuccagna. Photo credit: Cascina Cuccagna

Design criticism
DAE #TVClerici
Palazzo Clerici
Design Academy Eindhoven students and alumni presented a mashed-up
media and design studio curated by Jan Boelen.
The programme analysed the role and symbiotic relationship design plays
in contemporary media. Visitors were invited to move about on set and
backstage through a series of digital, analogue and augmented realities.
As a backdrop to this show was an ongoing conversation about the
complicated and interdependent relationship media and design has
typically enjoyed.
Read more here
http://www.atelierclerici.com/design-academy-eindhoven/
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA “#TVClerici” Design Academy di Eindhoven at Palazzo Clerici. Photo credit: Design Group Italia

Private colors
Trends in color harmony.
Rich and complex harmonies instead of single colors,
to suggest intimate, private, lived-in atmospheres.
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA Illustration by Ilaria Angelini for Design Group Italia, 2017

A nostalgic atmosphere
Time has taught us that when a technology becomes familiar, we stop
using it as a lure to sell or choose a product, and use it only if and when it
is truly needed. Technology in colour production has developed fast, and
colors have had high levels of effects, surfaces and materials in the past
to highlight the development. Colors have been exuberant and showy,
with special effects to highlight their tech savviness. But this year, they
presented us their mature, high quality and less showy side.
In particular, going round the installations and the showrooms, we have
noticed fewer iridescences, shades and special effects, and many more
pleasantly opaque surfaces and a perfect material density.
In co-ordination with the theme of pink, natural and chalky tones, the
other harmonies also use different pink and red with dark variants that
tend to the natural colors of leather, earth, and oxides, combined with
blue, green and gray, with the same attributes.
The atmosphere that results from these harmonies is a family taste,
slightly nostalgic.
The experience of immersing yourself in private spaces fits perfectly with
these color harmonies, which welcome the visitor to scenes that evoke
inhabited homes, rich in stratification of signs and traces of personal
experience.
01 / Trends in colour harmony
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA Sé collection for apartment at Rossana Orlandi’s Milan Showroom. Photo credit: DeZeen

A nostalgic atmosphere
DRAFT

Neutral but natural
Warm tones: brown is back
In the 1990s, largely thanks to Giorgio Armani, the world discovered that
the world of color also comprises the infinite family of neutrals,
including black.
Before Armani, black and grays were not considered as colors.
Today, we are richer in both our language to discuss color and our ability
to observe it.
Today, the culture of color belongs to us.
The landscape of neutrals is changing, becoming softer, cozy, and
warm. It is not a decisive or revolutionary change, but it is important
nevertheless. Warm neutrals, beige, and dark browns, along with fabrics
and materials that retain the original features of the material, without
covering them, suggest the pleasure of having objects around us with a
natural, organic feeling, in harmony with human essence.
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA Poliform at Salone del Mobile 2017. Photo credit: Courtesy of Poliform S.p.a.

Neutral but natural
Warm tones: brown is back
DRAFT

La vie en rose
Pale and natural: from beige to rose
Having coloured the catwalks and made its mark at other fairs, most
notably Maison & Objet Paris 2017, the colour pink arrived in Milan this
year, gently painting the entire city rose.
In 2015, following the dense and luxurious red, some pink tones could
already be seen in the interiors industry. The year after, Pantone might
have suggested the emotion of a nuance but with the cold tones
between pink and blue, but what we saw in Milano was rather a warm
harmony between soft pink and gentle tones of green.
This year pink flourished and bloomed. The discreet, soft and elegant
pink, with a matte surface and low saturation, left its touch on every
material possible, be it walls, floors, textiles, wood or ceramics. From the
warmest and clearest tone, almost a beige make-up powder, to the most
intense material pink.
Milan Design Week brought us into private worlds, intimate landscapes
and seamless atmospheres between objects and their environments.
Many of these worlds came in pink. This new sense of colour in spaces is
a result of a balanced harmony that does not reside in the single object.
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA Hayon Workshop by Jaime Hayon for Wittmann. Photo credit: Wittmann official

La vie en rose
Pale and natural: from beige to rose
DRAFT

Material fluidity
From geometric rules to primaeval motion
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA Illustration by Ilaria Angelini for Design Group Italia, 2017

Material fluidity
Last year, the most innovative graphic patterns and textures
communicated the idea of geometric shapes in motion, a dynamic push
to overcome the state of immobility and symmetry towards a continuous
'morphing', that added a temporal dimension to the images.
Now, this continuous movement has generated a fluid mix of elements,
whether two-dimensional or three-dimensional, that overcomes the
boundaries of geometric rules.
The fluid, magmatic state maintains the reference to the temporal
dimension, but frees itself from the rules, releasing a primordial creative
energy.
This also manifests as supremely diverse combinations of materials, be it
natural or artificial: glass mixed with metal, resin with sands and
conglomerates.
This experimentation animates objects, be it stratifications, mixes or pairs
with no grading limits.
02 / Trends in materials and textures
© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA “Progetto Domestico” Table DC1717, Vincenzo De Cotiis. Photo credit: Courtesy of Vincenzo De Cotiis

Material fluidity / Liquid mood
DRAFT

Material fluidity / Glass in motion
DRAFT

Material fluidity / Concrete waving
DRAFT

Material fluidity / Particle flow
DRAFT

Material fluidity / Trans-matter
DRAFT

Material fluidity / Crude essence
DRAFT

About Design Group Italia
We are a design innovation consultancy based in Milan and New York.
We work in several industries ranging from healthcare, consumer goods,
tourism to technology, with a diverse group of clients including Italian
classics, Silicon Valley start-ups, non-profits and global Fortune 500
companies.
At the center of everything we do is design thinking.
We believe that design has a unique ability to understand people,
problems and situations, leading us to create innovative solutions to
complicated challenges.
Founded 50 years ago, our team today consists of 60 professionals, who
represent 15 nationalities, working on projects all over the world.
About DGI CMF Lab
With over 20 years of experience, our team of leading CMF specialists
consults, researches and analyses both our clients and our branding,
product design, spaces and digital, UX & IoT teams – there is hardly a
DGI project that would not have input from our CMF Lab.
Our CMF team consists of CMF designers Stefania Perenich and
Simona Sagripanti.

Get in touch
To discuss CMF design, Milan Design Week trends or how we could work together in the future,
kindly contact Stefania Perenich Director, CMF Lab, stefania.perenich@designgroupitalia.it
or Senior CMF designer Simona Sagripanti, simona.sagripanti@designgroupitalia.it
For media and other enquiries, kindly contact Sari Peltonen, Director of communications, sari.peltonen@designgroupitalia.it
Stay in touch in social media:
@designgroupitalia
#designgroupitalia
#dgimilano
#dginyc
www.designgroupitalia.it
http://www.designgroupitalia.com/en/smart-labs/cmf-lab/3/
Milan Design Week Report 2015
http://www.designgroupitalia.com/en/news/2015/06/05/milan-design-week-report-2015/38/
Milan Design Week Report 2016
http://www.designgroupitalia.com/en/news/2016/06/07/milan-design-week-report-2016/64/

© DESIGN GROUP ITALIA
DESIGN GROUP ITALIA
Via Aleardo Aleardi, 12
20154 Milano ITALIA
tel. +39 02 58325272
www.designgroupitalia.it
315 Hudson St. Floor 2
New York, NY 10013 USA
Phone: +1 (347) 951-4350
Authors: Simona Sagripanti, Stefania Perenich
Graphic design: Vania Viscardi

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