“Hello Darkness”: BASE launches the open call for We Will Design 2026

BASE Milano announces the theme of We Will Design 2026 and officially opens its call for applications with Hello Darkness, an invitation to enter the shadow zones of the present and transform them into a fertile ground for imagination, resistance, and regeneration. Every year during Milan Design Week, BASE becomes a living lab of prototypes, radical visions, and emerging practices: not a static exhibition, but a space where evolving processes gain visibility and new voices use design as a social and political tool.
With Hello Darkness, the curatorial direction dives into the abyss, not as emptiness or absence, but as a generative condition where invisible communities, marginalized knowledge, and resilient practices take shape. Here, darkness becomes an ally: a porous infrastructure hosting underground imaginaries, new relationships, and forms of life capable of adapting and regenerating under pressure.
 

The theme also draws from Black feminist thought and Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, which invites us to learn how to breathe underwater, to coexist with uncertainty and discover paths of survival and coexistence in extreme conditions. The open call welcomes projects, visions, and speculative prototypes unafraid of the dark, those that turn shadows into infrastructures and, through design, imagine radical alternatives for inhabiting the present. Applications are open until 19 December 2025.
This edition will be guided by three Design Ambassadors: Cecilia Casabona, curator focused on collective, participatory, and performative practices; Matilde Losi, designer, editor, and curator working at the intersection of design and culture; Giulia Tomasello, interaction designer and educator exploring design, science, and anthropology with a focus on innovation in women’s health. With Hello Darkness, BASE reaffirms its commitment to exploring design as a critical and political tool, one that gives voice to what usually remains unseen, transforming darkness from disturbance to revelation, from a place of fear to a landscape of possibility.
The challenge is set: dive into the abyss, breathe under pressure, and illuminate what power keeps in the shadows.