Evolution, ecosystem, artificial intelligence and neuroscience are the keys to understanding the 63rd edition of the Milan Design Week Salone del Mobile, scheduled in Milan from April 16 to 21 in the halls of Rho Fiera.
Main world showcase and the most important business moment of the furniture industry sector, where the protagonists are the companies with 35 percent foreign attendance. Sector that closed 2023 with a turnover of 52.6 billion euros, of which almost 20 were exports and 32.7 the domestic market, registering a decrease of -8.1% compared to the previous year.
The New Frontier of the Salone del Mobile. Milan
The 2024 edition aims to ferry the Milan Design Week Salone towards a new season, no longer just an exhibition event, but an inclusive, experiential, and value-based ecosystem, capable of generating relationships, narratives, and planning and proposing multiple visions of contemporary living and dwelling. An ecosystem that will investigate itself, thanks to the contribution of the Milan Polytechnic, which will analyze, in advance and in real time, data and relationships in order to formulate forecasts, the basis of the future Permanent Observatory of Milan.
This edition will see the evolution of the Milan Design Week Supersalone format successfully inaugurated in 2021, taking note of the historical moment, rethought the event in terms of experimentation and contamination.
Evolution at Milan Design Week 2024
Visions of living and trends, flanked by exhibitions, site-specific installations and talks for an appointment in which, thanks to innovative paths, products and projects stand out in a context of reflection and sharing.
As Maria Porro, president of the Salone del Mobile. Milan. “Capturing new trends, the evolution of an entire sector by involving and listening to communities near and far, identifying new approaches, methodologies and technologies, experimenting, in an expression stand on the frontier: this is still the ambition of the Salone del Mobile.”
EuroCucina
With this in mind, the new layout designed by Lombardini22 studio, already the curator of the last edition, which extends to the biennial events, EuroCucina and Salone del Bagno.
Lombardini22 six has relied, for the first time in the exhibition field, on neuroscience, based on the study of visitors’ neurological, emotional and perceptual reactions to improve the experience of visiting the Salone. After various experiments in a virtual environment, a loop path was chosen for the biennials to improve orientation and make the visit more user-friendly and intuitive.
Distribution Optimization, then, makes it possible to reduce space and travel time by about half, and to group exhibitors by content and target audience so as to amplify value and meaning of the visit.
“Neuroscience, artificial intelligence, new formats and paths,” President Porro continued, “a unified but diffuse cultural project between coherence and multidisciplinarity. David Lynch’s rooms for thinking, Salotto NY’s installation that takes us underwater and between poetry and numbers takes stock of the state of the art of the bathroom industry, but also talks with many guests, including Pritzker Prize winner Francis Kéré, and visionary performances by artists and food designers: everything is designed to offer the visitor and exhibitor an exceptional experience in terms of content and container, impossible to replicate except here, at the Milan Salone, unthinkable to miss, even if it is not limited to a single week, but covers the whole year thanks to the propulsive and inclusive force of our digital platform.”
EuroCucina will, moreover, be the stage for “Ali You Have Ever Wanted to Know About Food Design in Six Performances,” a series of projects animated by international artists, designers, and chefs, accompanied by six food magazines, in which an unprecedented vision on the present and future of the ingredients that nature offers us will be presented through taste experiences, exhibitions and talks.
Through the food-project pair, the challenges and multiple opportunities offered by the food sector to the world of design will be investigated.