Are you ready for the next Design Week?
/ MDW26 @ BASE
Every year, during Design Week,
BASE transforms into a living laboratory of prototypes, radical visions, and practices.
This is where what is in the making finds space and visibility.
We welcome and promote projects by designers from all over the world, as well as schools, universities, international institutions, and young students.
An ecosystem of research, residencies, collective projects, and experimentation.
The Call for the Design Week 2026 at BASE is open until January 9.
People & Projects
Exhibit
A vast 4,000 sqm exhibition showcasing projects from academies, universities, design studios, and emerging designers.
Temporary Home
Five rooms for five designers from around the world. During Design Week, casaBASE—our hostel—will host five residency projects.
Il Campeggio sulla terrazza di BASE
A collective experiment and a place to stay: 10 days of shared living, design, and research alongside designers, architects, and artists from around the world.
Public Program
Design Week Public Program weaves together visual arts, architecture, poetry, and science.
Musica e feste
Nights of sonic exploration, where clubbing, art, and electronic subcultures intertwine.
Numbers /
Facts & Figures
BASE is a 12,000-square-meter project hub.
Every year, it is visited by over 500,000 people, 90,000 of whom attend during Milan Design Week.
BRITISH COUNCIL /
OPPORTUNITY
Are you a UK—based or Philippine—based designer?
Your Temporary Home for Design Week 2026 might be waiting for you.
BASE and British Council are looking for 2 emerging designers being based and operating their creative practice in/from the UK, or in/from the Philippines, to join the next edition of Milano Design Week. Apply by January 9th 2026.
We Will Design 2026:
HELLO, DARKNESS
Embracing darkness to reimagine how we live, resist, and create together.
Welcome to the Abyss, where darkness is not absence — it is a beginning.
In 2026 at BASE, darkness becomes a field of possibilities: a porous infrastructure that welcomes invisible gestures, marginalized knowledges, and luminous forms of resistance.
It is an invitation to design new ways of inhabiting the present, to build alternative communities, to imagine unexpected futures, and to make visible the hidden systems that sustain collective life.
HELLO DARKNESS
opens up a space where design becomes a tool to subvert hierarchies, weave together ecologies and technologies, and imagine the cities and societies of the future.
Four trajectories guide this exploration:
Inhabiting the Uninhabitable
Strategies for adapting and creating in hostile or unstable environments. Not just a response to crisis, but an invitation to imagine new ways of living and inhabiting the present under conditions of pressure and uncertainty.
Underground Practices
Radical processes that dismantle existing orders and nurture countercultures. Darkness becomes a space where alternative communities and forms of coexistence can emerge, challenging dominant systems and hierarchies.
Prophecies
Speculative visions that question the future and its possibilities. These trajectories are not escapes from reality but imaginative exercises that open space for unexpected narratives and critical reflections on what is to come.
Invisible Architectures
A focus on the submerged systems that sustain collective life yet often remain unseen. Design here becomes a tool to reveal and reimagine the hidden infrastructures that support our societies.
DESIGN AMBASSADORS
To shape the 2026 edition of We Will Design, three Italian designers and curators will lead the selection of the participating projects.
Cecilia Casabona
A curator specialized in design, Cecilia Casabona works on collective, participatory, and performative practices.
Matilde Losi
Matilde Losi is a designer, editor, and curator with a Master’s in Design Curating & Writing from the Design Academy Eindhoven.
Giulia Tomasello
Giulia Tomasello is an interaction designer and educator. Working at the intersection of design, science, and anthropology, she redefines the terms of intimate female care.