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.
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.
The Camp on BASE Terrace
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.
Music & Party
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.
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
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.
Witches in Lab Coats, Bodies in Revolt / Giulia Tomasello
On Magic, The Obscene, Bodily Fluids and Witches
