The 2026 edition of 5VIE Design Week is entitled QoT – Qualia of Things.

Qualia are the subjective and qualitative aspects of conscious experience: the “what it feels like” to perceive something. They are private experiences, not physically describable, and they constitute the “hard problem” of consciousness, as defined by David Chalmers.

By proposing an alternative to the now widespread Internet of Things (IoT), 5VIE shifts the focus from device connectivity and the efficiency of data and algorithms to the ability of objects to engage with our senses, creating emotions and sensations that are “unique and exclusive.”

Every object becomes a bearer of “quality of experience,” and every creation carries the imprint of both its creator and its recipient, becoming a threshold of memory and meaning. The unique piece is “lived” as an unrepeatable experience, while form becomes a catalyst of subjective resonances, ultimately offering each individual their own “sense of things.”

Design becomes a language capable of uniting perception and sensation, data and lived experience, in a world that is evolving ever more chaotically between technology and biology. Within this space of transformation emerges the urgency to safeguard the human dimension of feeling.

We cannot rely solely on the measurement of data or the power of algorithms: we must reassess the centrality of sensations and inner experiences — that which gives meaning to our experience of reality.

The formula “form that informs” acquires a new value: it is no longer merely a superficial analogy between shape and meaning, but an invitation to consider how form activates different Qualia in each individual. The object becomes an open field of subjective exchange, a network where every gaze, every touch, generates different resonances.

It is therefore not objects in themselves that matter, but what they evoke — the vibration they leave behind, the feeling they generate: the “red” perceived by each person, the inner vertigo evoked by design lines, the texture of a fabric beneath the fingers.

These are not merely measurable data, but irreducible lived experiences — unique and personal. In this perspective, QoT invites us to understand that it is not enough to observe an object: one must feel it, recognize it, and appreciate what it transmits to our consciousness.

As the physicist Federico Faggin states, “consciousness is the capacity to have experience through Qualia and to learn the meaning of that experience.”

QoT – Qualia of Things is therefore an invitation to consider design as both an aesthetic and an ethical practice, capable of speaking to the heart as much as to the mind.

In doing so, the NMG/5VIE Association reaffirms its mission: to promote a humanistic innovation of technology that restores the value of human feeling to the center.