As every spring, exhibitions, installations, and special projects turn Milan into an open-air workshop, where companies, designers, schools, and institutions reflect on the present of design and its possible futures. From materials research to the reimagining of domestic space, sustainability and the shifting relationship between human and non-human, Milan Design Week opens up to a range of questions and perspectives.
This is an essential guide to what’s worth seeing: shows, themes, and people shaping the way we think about design today.
Alcova 2025
Where: Varedo, Milan (4 locations)
When: April 7–13, 2025
Website: alcova.xyz
Alcova returns for its ninth edition during Milan Design Week, reaffirming its role as a key platform for designers, companies, institutions, and researchers exploring the future of living and making. Set across four atmospheric sites in Varedo—including Villa Borsani, Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, the former SNIA factory, and the Pasino greenhouses—the project unfolds as a path through site-specific installations, exhibitions, and talks. It’s a space where experimentation meets new materials and design perspectives come together, tracing a collective narrative that reflects on environments, objects, and systems reshaping the culture of contemporary design.
Tactile Baltics
Where: MoscaPartners Variations, Corso Magenta 24
When: April 7–13, 2025
Website: tactilebaltics.com
Tactile Baltics brings together work by 21 designers and brands from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The exhibition looks at contemporary Baltic design through a tactile lens—furniture, lighting, textiles, and objects shaped by natural or recycled materials, craft techniques, and formal experimentation. Tradition and technology overlap in a practice grounded in sustainability, function, and material sensibility. It’s a hands-on reflection on how Baltic designers navigate local production, innovation, and the language of design.
Making Kin, Base
Where: Via Biella 6, Barona District
When: April 7–13, 2025
Website: base.milano.it
For 2025, BASE builds its program around Making Kinships—an exploration of kinship as a deliberate, creative act, one that moves beyond biological ties to imagine relationships between humans, non-humans, and more-than-human entities. At its core is a large-scale exhibition: 4,000 square meters across two floors filled with projects from design studios, emerging talents, academies, and universities. The show grows out of a reflection on togetherness and the fragility of connection, proposing new forms of alliance built on choice, affinity, and care.
Capsule Plaza
Where: Spazio Maiocchi and other locations
When: April 7–13, 2025
Website: capsule.global
Capsule Plaza returns to Milan Design Week 2025 with a new edition themed Expanded Living, a reflection on hybrid spaces and the shifting boundaries of domestic life. Curated by Alessio Ascari and Paul Cournet, this year’s program unfolds across three venues: alongside Spazio Maiocchi, plus a former gym and pool, a garage, and a commercial space in Piazza Risorgimento. On show: Formafantasma, Sabine Marcelis, Faye Toogood, Philippe Malouin, and many others. Talks, workshops, and pop-ups round out the experience. Collaborations include Richard Lampert, Karimoku, 70materia, Elica, and Georg Jensen.
Romantic Brutalism
Where: Viale di Porta Vercellina 11
When: April 7–13, 2025
Website: visteria.pl
Marking the centenary of the 1925 Paris Expo—where Poland made a bid to assert its national identity—the newly funded Visteria Foundation presents an exhibition of some of the most compelling Polish design today. Curated by Federica Sala, the show brings together 23 Polish designers and reflects on the legacy of modernism, folk traditions, art deco, and brutalism—revisited through materials like wood, glass, ceramic, steel, lace, and textiles.
Happiness, Superdesign Show
Where: Superstudio Più, Via Tortona 27
When: April 7–13, 2025
Website: superdesignshow.com
To mark 25 years of Superdesign Show, Superstudio presents a special edition of the exhibition: HAPPINESS, a reflection on design as a generator of wellbeing in uncertain times. Immersive installations and forward-looking projects will bring together over 70 designers from 10 countries across 3 continents. More than 20 interactive works will animate the Tortona spaces, with the heart of the show being Unforgettable – 25 Years of Happy Design at Superstudio Più, curated by Giulio Cappellini and Leonardo Talarico. The exhibition traces the evolution of both the studio and the discipline through objects that have shaped the story of Italian design.
Wind Labyrinth, Sanlorenzo
Where: Courtyard of the University of Milan
When: April 7–17, 2025
In the 18th century courtyard of the University of Milan, Wind Labyrinth takes shape. A quiet, drifting installation by Piero Lissoni for Sanlorenzo, created for Fuorisalone 2025 as part of INTERNI’s CREACTION exhibition. Suspended in the air, a maze of reclaimed sails, including mainsails, jibs, and fragments once shaped by wind and salt, has been reworked through a careful upcycling process. The result is an ephemeral landscape of transparency and motion, where shadows shift and surfaces breathe. Visitors move through it slowly, like tracing a path through memory or mist. The piece reflects Sanlorenzo’s ongoing pursuit: imagining sustainable beauty and new ways of being in the world.
