We Will Design
An ecosystem of research, residencies, collective projects and experimentation that lives all year round and culminates every April during Design Week.
We Will Design is BASE Milano’s platform dedicated to the new generation of design.
Designing the present to imagine new futures.
Every year, during Design Week, BASE transforms into a living lab of prototypes, radical visions and practices.
This is where the in-progress finds space and visibility: alongside major institutions, you’ll find emerging designers, schools, and universities from around the world. New and urgent voices using design as a tool to question the present—and rewrite it in ways that are more equitable, accessible, and conscious.
Making Kin
The 2025 edition was inspired by the thinking of Donna Haraway, imagining new forms of kinship between humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans.
Making Kin was an invitation to build alliances based on care, affinity, and shared sensitivities—a creative act of resistance in times of crisis, expressed through the language of design.
TALkins –– Talking about Making Kins
For the 2025 edition, artists, curators, designers, philosophers, scientists, and interspecies relationship experts came together to reflect on the idea of “making kin”—exploring new ways of connecting living beings to the worlds around them.
This led to TALkins, a series of public talks exploring kinship through diverse languages, perspectives, and formats.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
NEWSLETTER
in–depth, the We Will Design newsletter
A monthly dispatch for those who want to see design through fresh eyes. in–depth is our editorial letter: a curated selection of projects, reflections, collaborations, and stories that explore design as a social, political, and emotional practice.
Each issue is a deep dive into: in-progress research, residencies, recommendations, and open-ended questions.
It’s an autonomous editorial space, shaped by the same critical and experimental outlook that animates all of We Will Design.
Selected Issues:
ISSUE #09. Tangled Rituals, Urban Choreographies
Architecture that cooks, listens, and grows in public.
ISSUE #07. What stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.
We’re ready to Make Kin with in–depth’s special edition for Design Week 2025.
ISSUE #06. Beyond the Human
Spoiler alert: sea creatures, flowers and digital praying. Who's joining Design Week 2025?
ISSUE #05. The inspiration continues
We set new deadlines, new opportunities, new resolutions: to make kin.
ISSUE #04. We've been at Dutch Design Week!
We love design so much, we follow it wherever it leads. From Eindhoven to BASE, it’s a journey brimming with inspiration that will culminate at We Will Design during Milano Design Week 2025.
ISSUE #03. Making kin
For Design Week 2025, we seek projects working on kinship with humans, non humans and more than humans
ISSUE #02. Between houses and homes
How caring for the private dimension also means caring for the social environment.
ISSUE #01. Body and pleasure
What do design, pleasure, bodies and society have to do with each other?
All Past Design Week Editions at BASE
CASE
More than just exhibits: with CASE, We Will Design became a critical space
How do we care for private space? And how does this care shape our social environments?
In 2024, CASE was born: a public program co-curated with Erica Petrillo, exploring housing as a political act.
From January to March, BASE hosted talks, gatherings, design labs, and open conversations on cohabitation, co-housing, and the housing emergency.
These urgent, cross-cutting themes sparked a polyphonic conversation that continued into the 2024 Design Week program and led to a call for two new design residencies.
This collective reflection also took shape as a zine, printed by hand in two-color screenprint by VerySeri on certified paper from Paper&People—available also in digital format.
Jail Time Records: exploring freedom through incarceration
In a prison in Douala, Cameroon, music becomes a tool for care and transformation. With Dione Roach and Steve Happi, art passes through the bars.
THE IMAGE THAT WILL NOT GO AWAY
A collective inquiry into Palestinian self-representation in Western cultural contexts. With DEMO + DARNA, moving through research, resistance, and memory.
CASE #REMAPPED
Two residencies to imagine experimental, collective ways of living rooted in care. Architecture beyond ownership, design beyond the object.
CASE #00. MILANO
Starting here, rethinking conviviality as a political need. What new infrastructures of care can we build for living together?
CASE #03. LOCAL
Collective practices for rethinking habitation, hands in the material. A hands-on self-building workshop led by Francesca Gotti.
CASE #02. EUROPE (EXPANDED)
A journey through informal schools, mutual support, and shared futures. Forty Five Degrees traces new maps for collective learning.
CASE #01. WORLD
Pelin Tan on temporary infrastructures and post-crisis cohabitation. A keynote lecture to rethink hospitality and survival.