Ready for
Design Week?
/ April 20th — 26th
Press Opening April 19th 3-7pm
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.
We Will Design 2026
it’s 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.
BASE is a 12,000-square-meter project hub. It draws over 500,000 visitors annually — 90,000 during Milan Design Week alone.
Explore Design Week @ BASE map
Ground Hall main installation, 2 floors of Exhibit featuring 60+ designers and artists from around the world, 5 rooms of Temporary Home, the Camping Terrace, the indoor and outdoor Music events, and the spacious Foodcourt. Find out how to navigate through BASE during DW.
EXHIBIT OPENING HOURS
20 APR | 10:30am — 7pm
21 APR | 10:30am — 8pm
22 APR | 10:30am — 8pm
23 APR | 10:30am — 8pm
24 APR | 10:30am — 8pm
25 APR | 10:30am — 8pm
26 APR | 10:30am — 6pm
Last admission 1H before closing time
Installation
IDIORYTHMIA — by Studio Smarin transforms BASE Ground Hall from an agora to a screening room, from a work environment to a convivial area, even a stage or a simple place to stay.
Exhibit
4000m2 of exhibition that brings together projects from academies, universities, design studios, and emerging designers and artists.
Temporary Home
Five rooms for five designers from around the world. During Design Week, casaBASE—our hostel—hosts five projects in residence.
Live Camp-ing
A collective experiment and a place to stay: 10 days of shared living, design, and research alongside designers, architects, and artists.
Public Program & Party
A Public Program that intertwines visual arts, architecture, talks, and science with nights of sonic exploration, clubbing, and electronic subcultures.
Foodcourt
A large courtyard where you can eat and drink whatever you want. Vegan options available this year.
Batu /
Andrewww
Quantic / Coca Puma
Outdoor stage
PUBLIC PROGRAM
The Darker the Night the Brighter the Opening
Live Camp-ing Convivial Roundtables
The Elephant in the Waiting Room
Across A Flock’s Orbit
IDIORYTHMIA — a first spark for a rhythmic approach to design
Temporary Home: five rooms for five designers from around the world. During Design Week, casaBASE—our hostel—hosts five projects in residence.
ROOM 04. Cristina Dezi — RED NOISE
ROOM 03. Saúl Baeza and Manuela Valtchanova — A Dream House
ROOM 01. Jean-Baptiste Durand — Bittersweet Symphony
EXHIBIT — RITUALS: design as ritual
Le Ambigue — on/scenity
Cristobal Olmedo — Obsidian Reflections
Altra Venezia (Gloria Marangon, Andrea Tartari) — CHAOSMOS – EVA
Studio Tal Ve Tomer — HERE TOO.
Selenia Marinelli — Uterine Spaces
Sara Bonaventura — Plasticenta
Martina Carbone — Jeno
Salicornia Studio — Ricettario dal Futuro
Pamela Varela & Ella Hebendanz — Re-c(O)unting I. Self-exploring bodies, stories, laboratories
Ginevra Petrozzi — Many Lives Calendar
Tommaso Pardini — Mare Fecunditatis
EXHIBIT — COMMUNITIES: design as social tool
Kairos Futura — The Wild Future Lab
Chloé Terrée — Landscape of Positions
Carolina Mortara Aghemio — Cannibal Gold
Gil Monteverde — Atmospheres from Below
Maëlys Venkiah — The Shape of Sugar
Ache C. Wang — BLOOMscrolling, an act of resistance
Catalina Gómez Alvarez — Kuchen De Manzana
Cezara Pădurean & Claudia Feti | Faculty of Arts and Design Timișoara — The Unseen Grid
EXHIBIT — ENVIRONMENTALISM: design as ecosystem
Anastrophes Collective — The Static Between Us
Antonia Aschenbrenner — Fragments of a Supercell
Micheal Mccready — From The Ground Up
Ivan Donzelli — Dora
Giuseppe Campanella — The Walk
Giulia Braglia — Ephemeral Gardens
Elena Tosi Brandi — FOREVER
Cassie Quinn — Transient Gradients
Gigi Totaro — Postnatural Remains
Christos Voûtas — Floating Lands
Laurin Böhm — Flōssern
Archeomaterico — Telare la Materia
Guido Pupulin — TERRARIUM
Alter Atelier — The Fungierie
STUDIO LLOTTA (Lorenzo Lanzoni, Tommaso Tresso) — Nine Frames From Collapse
BY THE END OF MAY — Living Layers
Dafne Argondizza, Camilla Piantanida, Riccardo Zambelli, Matteo Bernasconi — Lilipur
Atelier Atollo x Panneau Piano — TAKE a STAND!
EXHIBIT — MEDIA TECH: design as interface
Carolina Carmona Hermenegildo — Redefining Darkness
Dario Formicola — Tribavox
Gabriele Nasole — Cetacæ
Robert Clark, Sky Feng— The Machine That Learned to Breath
Common Index — An Ecology of Beasts
RAD – Alessandro Raymundo Design — FOMO
Aleksandra Nazarova — Chronotopic Fractures
Yuhan Fang — Transitional States of Perpetual Continuity
Avcu Birce — Hidden Hedonism
Studio Superfluo + Chiara Ciccarelli — HYPER-LIT
Loretta Wong, Melody Liu, Tila Tuzuturk — Chorus of Mood
Jeongseok Hwang, Minjeong Kim, Soohyun Namkoong / Royal College of Art — SHADOOR
Design Ambassadors
Cecilia Casabona
A curator specializing 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 degree in Design Curating & Writing from the Design Academy Eindhoven.
Giulia Tomasello
Giulia Tomasello is an interaction designer and educator. Combining design, science, and anthropology, she redefines the terms of feminine intimate care.
Three Italian designers and curators are shaping the 2026 edition of We Will Design, heading the selection process for all participating projects.
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.
How can We mend our broken hearts? / Cecilia Casabona
IN DEPTH #17 MARCH-APRIL 2026
It all begins with a fracture: that of a 2026 that shatters democratic illusions and delivers us collective, political, and incurable pain.
In this reflection, Cecilia Casabona does not escape the darkness, but inhabits it, transforming the broken heart into the new class consciousness of our times.
Through a selection of radical practices—from the material memories of sugar to coalitions between design and activism, to new shamanic rituals for the digital age—she explores design no longer as a product, but as a strategy for survival and collaboration.
An invitation to reclaim design as a verb: an act of resistance to mend broken bonds and transform disenchantment into a necessary, and finally free, form of imagination.
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.
And if you love design
as much as we do
Our newsletter dedicated to We Will Design, BASE’s experimental laboratory that hosts the visions of designers, schools, universities, international institutions, and young students from around the world.
You’ll only receive updates on our design activities throughout the year: residencies, public programs, events, and insights, all the way up to Design Week.