Over the past week end, the Never Say Cool team got the opportunity to visit the Tortona Design Week, one on the best itineraries over the Fuori Salone Fair held in Milan.
2 things came up immediately walking around Tortona and Savona Street. First: the crisis affected a lot the design niche. We found quite a lot less installations than in the past years and there was quite less party feeling all around the fair. Second, and this was nice news from our perspective, a lot more designers have shown to be into eco-friendly design. Never like this year, there has been a trend toward using eco materials, such as recycled paper and biodegradable structures. Maybe this will involve a reduced duration of our new furniture but, if applied, this would be such a change for our planet.
In terms of creativity, installations included surely very nice furniture, but we also saw very nice experiments with augmented reality, lighting and video installations, which made our visit rather enjoyable and less plain than in the last years.
Here are some highlights…
France Design
French design talents in Milan. showcased the rich diversity of French creators for contemporary living in ‘France Design’. This VIA exhibition-event – co-produced with media relations group LHLC Presse – brought together rising talents in French design in a single venue at Padiglione Visconti (via Tortona). 1200 square metres contained the VIA Creation Assistance Grants (Aides à la Création VIA), Monde Commun, a research exhibition mounted by 8 French art & design schools, Material Matters 2 by Particule14, and Les Editeurs, a round-up selection of French design producers. All told 150 prototypes, projects and new products were on show, created by confirmed and emerging talents.
www.francedesign.eu
Creative Space Serbia is the showcase of Serbian design promoted by SIEPA (Serbia Investment and Promotion Agency) which brings ot Milan the spontaneity and innovation of a new generation od designers and their products for local manifacturers. Conceived as a metaphorical space station, launching new Serbian talents, energies and lifestyles into the international design scene, the 2012 edition will be inspired by the theme of “Hanging Fiction”, an unprecedented design narrative for new ideas and projects.
I Love My Wellness
The installation “White Air”, which has been designed by Carlo Colombo for Cristalplant® & Poliform this year, features non conventional organic shapes, holograms, and light and shadow effects.
The exhibition space is divided into two areas: one displays the prototypes of the award-winning products of the Cristalplant® Design Contest 2012, whereas the central area is dedicated to the interactive holograms of the mention winning products. Hence, visitors can rotate the images of the products by 360° on two axis, simply moving around the space.
Listening, watching, imagining, dreaming. Fragments of images and sounds are pulled apart and put togheter to yield up, through visual and sound suggestions, the creative concept, the sensitivity, the intuition from which every project is born.
Project: Vicente Garcia Jimenez.
Video: Massimo Gardone.
Steelish, the name given to the installetion conceived for the Temporary Museum for New Design, presents a new version in Steel of Ciclotte, the innovative exercise bike and forniture complement designed by Luca Schieppati and manufactured by the Lamiflex Group in Italy. The other important innovetion presented at FuoriSalone 2012 is the Tablet/Smart-phone holder, an accessory that allows users to provide Ciclotte with new fundamentals functions.
Presenting a striking and symbolic presentation of both the bliss evoked by the fine creamy foam generated by new water control technology, and of the new lifestyle－the possibilities created by the transformation of the functions and interiors of the home-that is engendered by this innovation.
Design: Kenya Hara
In the Samsung Exhibition the installation consisted of a gray space where the domestic space, the standard furniture and the scenes of nature are covered with an opaque gray sprayed velvet texture. A world aphonia, deaf and anti-retinal which contrasts with the image and sounds on the tablet that triggers the vision perceived by our eyes.
Designed by Italo Rota.