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MDW22: SaloneSatellite Showcases the Best From Under 35 Designers

06.21.22 | By
MDW22: SaloneSatellite Showcases the Best From Under 35 Designers

SaloneSatellite is the part of Milan Design Week’s main trade fair dedicated to designers aged under 35 and to new prototypes that have not been produced or marketed – as well as design schools – with the aim of connecting them to research, design, and industry opportunities. It is always a Design Milk favorite and didn’t disappoint this year.

Lagos-based designer Lani Adeoye won first place in the SaloneSatellite “Designing for our Future Selves” award, and she takes first place in our roundup too. She was showcasing the Ekaabo Collection of furniture made in collaboration with Nigerian craftspeople more used to turning their skills to dressmaking, tailoring, and shoemaking. “Ekaabo” means welcome in Yoruba and the collection is inspired by West African hospitality, making contemporary use of heritage materials such as Adire, Aso-oke, and Bronze from Benin.

It was a delight to see Disharee Mathur having featured her previous collection on Circular by Design. Using traditional techniques from Jaipur Blue Pottery, her Passive Cooling Tiles are made from waste sanitaryware and waste glass and they absorb ambient moisture to prevent buildings from overheating – a climate-positive solution to fight the effects of global warming.

“If you want to mend the world, start by mending your socks.” Students at Art Academy of Latvia have chosen socks as a metaphor for any product of the 21st century that supports everyday consumption, because of their role in Latvian culture and the centuries-old tradition of gifting them to newborn babies, the sick, and soldiers heading to war – if you can mend, you should, is their message.

“Men like to award men,” ’80/20,” “Diverse jurys award more diversely,” and “overperformance” are just some of the words and phrases printed onto the plastic shroud that covered the graduate projects of students from Fachbereich Potsdam University of Applied Sciences – they used the opportunity of exhibiting at Milan Design Week to challenge the “social ceilings” that persist in design in an installation they called Stuck.

These glass vessels are mouth-blown into wooden molds which catch fire in the process changing both their shape and the shape of the glass. It’s a Finnish technique from the 1960s which Helsinki-based Russian artist, designer, and interior architect Katerina Krotenko is reviving.

Daniel Costa makes rugs, textiles, and paintings “anything tactile” working with farmers, spinners, and weavers in Nepal where yak, sheep, and goats are highly evolved to cope with the weather there. “Those mountains set the tone to life and survival, to mythology and craft,” says Daniel.

Inspired by ocean myths, Aphrodite “taking form from the goddess Venus born of sea spray” is an incredible lamp handwoven from fibers from the fast-growing banaca tree (closely related to the banana) and then hand-painted by Milan-based Filipina designer Mirei Monticelli who works closely with the same community of artisans as her fashion-designer mum!

This candy-floss pink freestanding modular kitchen by Dedaleo is designed to grow and change with you – a great way to reduce waste in interior design and architecture. “ilo+milo is a series of playful kitchen modular elements, designed to fit and adapt to any space and need,” say its designers. “With ilo+milo, the kitchen is no longer fixed furniture, it’s an interactive and never-ending self-renovating part of the house.”

Brazilian designer Tavinho Camerino is combining sustainability with his ancestry of handmade knowledge in the Taboa Collection. Created in collaboration with a community of artisans from Feliz Deserto, they combine aluminum bases with Taboa straw fibers, which are native to the local riverbanks.

The incredible S/M-W DESK by Italian architect and designer Anna Arpa is made from 15,000 tiny pieces of waste timber showcasing 10 underused wood species.

The Continuum Collection by Cyryl Zakrzewski, Boom Plastic, & Nowmodel.org reimagines waste plastic as a high-end luxury material. Cyryl is a sculptor, designer, and graduate of the Faculty of Sculpture and Spatial Activities of the Poznan University of Arts.

And last but not least, this modular flower stand is designed to grow and change with your life – and your plant collection! Its designer Timea describes the principle as similar to LEGO bricks – and it certainly plays into the trend for biophilic design.

Katie Treggiden is a purpose-driven journalist, author and, podcaster championing a circular approach to design – because Planet Earth needs better stories. She is also the founder and director of Making Design Circular, a program and membership community for designer-makers who want to join the circular economy. With 20 years' experience in the creative industries, she regularly contributes to publications such as The Guardian, Crafts Magazine and Monocle24 – as well as being Editor at Large for Design Milk. She is currently exploring the question ‘can craft save the world?’ through an emerging body of work that includes her fifth book, Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure (Ludion, 2020), and a podcast, Circular with Katie Treggiden.