BASE Milano at Design Week 2026 - We Will Design: Hello Darkness

BASE Milano presents We Will Design 2026 – HELLO DARKNESS, subverting expectations by choosing to “dim the lights.” While the design world pursues hyper-visibility, BASE’s research program dedicated to design, We Will Design, transforms the former Ex Ansaldo into a radical ecosystem: a week of immersive installations, biodesign, and collective rituals exploring contemporary darkness—political, ecological, and social—not as a crisis, but as a fertile space for regeneration. 

Embodying BASE’s multifaceted spirit, the Ground Hall hosts an intervention by the French studio Smarin which, in partnership with the Institut français Milano, presents IDIORYTHMIA – RE-U construction system. 
This is a reversible and polymorphic furniture system capable of continuously reconfiguring space: from an agora to a screening room, from a workspace to a convivial area, to a stage for performances or simply a place to dwell, with capsules dedicated to rest. The installation behaves as a social, biological, and technological system that shifts function, rhythm, and atmosphere according to its uses and the communities that inhabit it. 

IDIORYTHMIA derives from the Greek idios (one’s own, personal) and rhythmos (rhythm). In this sense, the installation creates the conditions to live and work together while maintaining one’s individual rhythm, balancing autonomy and coexistence. 
It is both a temporary and symbolic infrastructure, placing hospitality at its core. 

The experimental approach of We Will Design also resonates in the rooms of casaBASE, which hosts five temporary studios through the project Temporary Home: spaces that simultaneously become places for living, experimentation, personal research, and exhibition. 
Designers

Jean Baptiste Durand, Bianca Carague, Lucrezia Alessandroni, Cristina Dezi, Saúl Baeza, and Manuela Valtchanova. 

At the heart of the week is Exhibit, the collective exhibition featuring more than 80 designers from 23 countries. Across 4,000 square meters within BASE, projects by academies, universities, design studios, and emerging designers are presented. The exhibition unfolds along four thematic trajectories—interpretations of the Hello Darkness concept—that guide the experience without rigidly structuring it: underrepresented communities (Community), ecology and sustainability (Environmentalism), rituals (Rituals), and technologies (Media Tech). These directions do not function as fixed categories, but rather as fields of resonance, allowing for a transversal reading of the works and bringing into dialogue diverse approaches, geographies, and sensibilities.