The city fills with spectacular installations and crowds; hotel rates soar to prohibitive levels, taxis become impossible to find. Such is the Milan Design Week effect, whose repercussions – both positive and negative – are well known. But what drives this success? Where is there room for improvement, and what challenges lie ahead, now and in the future? We put these questions to three key figures behind this macro-event
Paolo Casati
Founder of the digital platform fuorisalone.it and Creative Director of Brera Design District
Milan Design Week exists because Milan exists. This is not a geographical detail but a cultural condition – one that enables an ongoing dialogue between design and industry. The Fuorisalone emerged within this very system as a spontaneous phenomenon. One of the most compelling outcomes of this process is the Design Week’s capacity to become, each year, a moment of urban regeneration. Districts, buildings, and often overlooked spaces are temporarily reactivated. Many places now central to the geography of the Design Week were first revealed through temporary events that anticipated broader urban transformations. The Fuorisalone has never lost its open, plural nature – a constellation of initiatives arising from the ground up. This, at times anarchic, dimension has been its true strength. Any attempt to rigidly frame this system through a generic notion of “quality” would risk distorting it, for the Fuorisalone has grown precisely through its ability to embrace the unforeseen. The Fuorisalone 2026 theme, Being Project, stems from this reflection: design is not an object but a condition. We have sought to shift the focus from outcome to process – one shaped by attempts, errors, intuitions, and the interplay between different disciplines. The challenge ahead will be to preserve this openness while
refining the tools through which the city manages an ever more complex event. In this direction moves Fuorisalone Passport, a digital platform allowing visitors to access events through a single QR code. Milan will remain central if it continues to do what it has always done: connect different worlds and transform this energy into design.
