Are you ready for the next Design Week?
/ April 20th — 26th
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.
Milano Design Week Press Opening @ BASE April 19th 2026 from 3pm to 7pm
BASE is a 12,000-square-meter project hub.
It draws over 500,000 visitors annually — 90,000 during Milan Design Week alone.
Design Week 2026 Projects @ BASE
Ground Hall Installation
IDIORYTHMIA — by Studio Smarin transforms BASE’s Ground Hall from an agorà into a screening room, and from a workspace into a social hub, a performance stage, or simply a place to be, with dedicated rest capsules.
Exhibit
4,000 sqm of exhibition space featuring projects by academies, universities, design studios, and emerging designers
Temporary Home
Five rooms for five designers from around the world. During Design Week, casaBASE — our hostel — becomes home to five designer residencies.
BASE Terrace Camp
A collective experiment and a place to stay: 10 days of communal living, design, and research alongside designers, architects, and artists from all over the world.
Public Program
The Design Week Public Program interweaves visual arts, architecture, poetry, and science.
Music and parties
Nights of sonic exploration, where clubbing, art, and electronic subcultures collide.
We Will Design 2026:
HELLO, DARKNESS
Embracing darkness to re-imagine how we live, resist and create together.
Welcome to the Abyss, where darkness is not absence — it’s 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 ecologies and technologies together and imagine cities and societies of the future.
4 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.
Temporary Home: five rooms for five designers from around the world. During Design Week, casaBASE—our hostel—becomes home to five residency projects.
ROOM 01. Jean-Baptiste Durand — Bittersweet Symphony
ROOM 02. Bianca Carague — Technospoonism
ROOM 03. Saúl Baeza and Manuela Valtchanova — A Dream House
And great music too: outdoor events accompanying us toward sunset throughout Design Week and two nights of sonic exploration curated by Le Cannibale—where clubbing, art, and electronic subcultures intertwine to form new communities.
Le Cannibale — Quantic, Coca Puma
Le Cannibale — Batu, Andrewww
We Will Design Sound System — Duwe, Luca
We Will Design Sound System — Giale, Hiroko Hacci
We Will Design Sound System — Bravissimi Ragazzi
Design Ambassadors
Three Italian designers and curators are shaping the 2026 edition of We Will Design, heading the selection process for all participating projects.
Cecilia Casabona
Curatrice specializzata in design, Cecilia Casabona lavora su pratiche collettive, partecipative e performative.
Matilde Losi
Matilde Losi è designer, redattrice e curatrice con un Master in Design Curating & Writing dalla Design Academy Eindhoven.
Giulia Tomasello
Giulia Tomasello
è interaction designer ed educatrice. Tra design, scienza ed antropologia, ridefinisce i termini della cura intima femminile.
The Design Ambassadors explore and reinterpret the 2026 curatorial theme, Hello Darkness, each in their own unique way. They do so with total freedom, through practices, writings, sounds, and inspirations, ensuring that everything happening at BASE this year originates, first and foremost, as a conversation.
The Art Falling Lightly /
Matilde Losi
IN DEPTH #15 FEBRUARY 2026
It begins with an image that is simple yet unsettling at once: falling into a well. This metaphor evokes the idea of descending into the depths to get to the bottom of things, observing what often remains hidden and allowing oneself the time to listen.
Through a selection of readings spanning literature and design, Matilde Losi’s reflection focuses on lightness—not as an escape, but as a conscious attitude: a way of looking at constraints and complexity with curiosity, imagination, and a sense of play.
Alongside these reflections, Matilde gathers a selection of projects demonstrating how mindful and playful creativity can transform limits and heaviness into opportunities for awareness, connection, and meaningful change.
Witches in Lab Coats,
Bodies in Revolt /
Giulia Tomasello
IN DEPTH #14 JANUARY 2026
It begins like a confidence — Giulia Tomasello’s letter to the darkness.
She doesn’t just cross it: she recognizes it. She calls it by name.
In her words, Hello Darkness becomes a space to inhabit — between practices and spells, research and desire, between bodies that expose and transform themselves. It speaks of magic and of what is obscene simply because it is alive. Of fluids and witches, of rebellious knowledge. Of liminal, disobedient practices. Of disillusionment as a necessary fracture.
And finally, of re-enchantment as a strategy of resistance to reclaim that ever-saving force — imagination.