After the 2010 edition, which revealed details and behind-the-scenes aspects of the objects on display by narrating their production processes, the group—partly renewed—composed of Line Depping and Jakob Jorgensen, Elisa Honkanen, Peter Johansen, Elia Mangia, Simone Simonelli—now gathers at Careof to engage in a discussion about the qualities of design. What characteristics grant an object the status of ‘quality design’? Durability over time, accessibility, functionality, environmental impact, innovation, emotional content? Each designer develops their own design values by defining different ideas of ‘quality’.

As emphasized by the Danes Line Depping and Jakob Jorgensen: “The current financial crisis will no longer allow the levels of growth and consumption of recent years and will make resource procurement more complicated. Environmental challenges as well as financial ones await us, and we must all face them. For us designers, this challenge is particularly demanding; we need to reflect on how to pay greater attention when proposing new objects. What do we really need? What can we do without? Which choices are truly environmentally responsible?”

For Elia Mangia, too, the current economic context confronts the designer with the need to raise quality standards. “More generally, I don’t think the final quality of an object can be reduced to a specific requirement. Its realization is a complex and articulated process, not the result of an isolated and solitary creative act,” where fundamental are “the rigor and coherence adopted during the production phase, the stubborn attention to detail, and the ability to interact with all the professionals involved in the process.”

Elisa Honkanen approaches design and production by balancing attention to detail, function, and aesthetic outcome. Meanwhile, Peter Johansen strips objects down to their essentials, creating pieces that, through their simplicity, embody the integrity of a project carefully crafted in every detail.

In questioning the quality of prototypes compared to products on the furniture design market, Simone Simonelli responds to contemporary habits by focusing on microliving — where objects and spaces are required to serve multiple functions, oscillating between containment and habitation.

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With the support of Comune di Milano and Fondazione Cariplo