The wonder year
It’s now over nine years since we first carefully crammed a brimful of one-off designs into Brioni’s Milan HQ, introducing an unsuspecting audience to what is now a must-see fixture at Salone del Mobile. Even we were a little shocked and awed by what we pulled off with that inaugural Wallpaper* Handmade exhibition: a showcase of 76 unique collaborations that mixed and matched designers, makers and manufacturers from around the world.
The one-off collaboration – the opportunity for a brand to play with new ideas and new talent – is now a popular tactic at Milan Design Week. It’s a trend we like to take at least some credit for. But it also means that every year we need to add extra top-spin and swerve to what we serve up there.
This year, we tasked designers and makers with thinking about the rest, repair and elevation of mind and body. It was an idea we tagged ‘Wellness + Wonder’. This was no woolly bandwagon-boarding. There was serious intent behind that idea, important questions asked: What can and should we mean now by ‘functionality’? How much can we really expect design and designers to do? Can design bolster and becalm? In the age of digital overload, squeezed sleep, sometimes crushing personal and professional expectations, can design really make us feel better? And when, to paraphrase Arthur C Clarke, technology comes off like magic, how does the physical thing, the analogue object, create wonder? We hope the pieces created for this year’s Handmade exhibition, and presented and catalogued in various remarkable ways across this special issue, provide a multitude of answers: from huggable columns to big bouncy back benders, glimmering altars to inflatable rugs, meditative land and lightscapes (our newsstand cover star) to snappy, silvery chocolate cases for the occasional moodenhancing nibble.
To wellness and wonder we should, and did, add wit. The centrepiece of this year’s exhibition was Maarten Baas’ ‘Forever Young’ playground, realised with perfect attention to off-kilter, wobblyedged detail by Henge (page 078). Baas’ improbable loop-the-loop slides and cartoon see-saws talked about play and the passing – and odd circularity – of time, of an openness to pure and giddy pleasure. ‘Forever Young’ is funny, charming, challenging, but only ‘functional’ if you think a key function of design is to engage the inner child and energise and enlighten the sometimes bruised and befuddled adult. And you really should.