Mondi Connessi: projects and installations of the Fuorisalone 2024

Mondi Connessi (Connected Worlds) will be the theme of the 2025 edition of Fuorisalone, a pair of words that looks at design as a participatory and generative practice, and at design as a discipline capable of involving and including, together with forms of artificial intelligence. These are some of the key concepts that design is questioning today, whether it is product, furniture, communication or spatial design, disciplinary facets that transform contemporary culture into tools for relating to the world. Or to the many worlds that make up our surroundings.
Creating bridges with the natural sphere, with portions of society that often remain distant from us, or between spaces that do not always touch is not simple, and therefore design also makes its own tools that come from elsewhere, more or less integrating the help by new technologies. We saw it at the Fuorisalone 2024 edition, where there were many events and appointments that highlighted this growing role of design, as a translator and builder of bonds.




What spoke to us about a new dialogue between physical and digital worlds were above all installations that highlighted the new potential offered by a collaborative design practice together with artificial intelligence, such as Data Bugs, AI is a Mirror by dotdotdot, which presented a reflection on the social implications and risks that data polarization has in fueling bias and stereotypes.




Even Google - in collaboration with the artistic and research laboratory Chromasonic -, with the Making Sense of Color installation, spoke about the intersection between these two worlds, with an immersive journey from the ethereal to the material, which highlighted how color is fundamental to perceiving the world around us.




What is happening in the world of culture and the ever-increasing need for production settings that place sustainability at the center of corporate reflections were instead events that looked with fascination at the plant world, imagining new ways of entering into relationships with it. First of all was the appointment at the Zegna headquarters, where a huge installation inspired by the historic identity of the brand brought a small piece of the Zegna Oasis to the Milanese spaces, a path to walk among the lush vegetation of the forest and interact with the stories and images that animate the pages of the book published for the occasion.





Even among the rooms of the Superdesign Show you could come across an "innovative indoor forest", an installation entitled Like Trees in the Wood imagined by NichelcromLab which staged an unprecedented dialogue between nature, materials and technology. The visitor could, in fact, walk through a forest of oak trees that reflected and replicated themselves infinitely thanks to the mirrored steel that surrounded them. This work created an extraordinary visual experience, multiplying space and generating, through optical illusions, a virtuous dialogue between the natural environment and the artificial environment.




In the heart of the city, however, Porsche brought the large installation The Pattern of Dreams, designed by the design collective Numen/For Use, taking up the monochromatic diagonals of the "Pepita" motif typical of the 356 models first and then of the iconic 911. Composed of a light structure of metal modules supporting a network of black and white nets, Lines of Flight composed a sort of floating landscape, inviting visitors to climb onto it to explore this social sculpture in the form of a kind of community hammock.




Connecting people through the design of public spaces is another key theme. Architects and designers are called to create environments that encourage social interaction and inclusion and this is how, this year, the hospitality of those arriving in Milan for the Design Week has been at the center of many projects, from The Glitch Camp by IED - which hosted students under 30 for free at the Enrico Cappelli Savorelli Sports Center - at the rooftop camping of BASE Milano with a spatial intervention by the Parasite 2.0 studio, from the project on precarious living entitled "Runaways" from DOPO? up to the Foresteria, imagined by C41 to become an exclusive artist residence in the center.





Fundamental themes for the future of design - such as sustainable design, circular economy, innovation in materials - find some of the most efficient and high-performance technical syntheses. Hyundai brought an example to the Fuorisalone 2024, whose mission has always been to make progress within everyone's reach and improve people's lives.