Like every year since a decade, last week I visited Milan Design Week. I spotted a number of wellbeing design concepts, spanning yoga, meditation, and some fascinating applications of food culture and well-being in the workplace.
I had the feeling that with the growing number of exhibition venues, collaborations, and festival-like formats, many brands had understood that the visitors seek for ways to slow down, recharge, and be present in the ‘now’ to be able to digest it all. It’s a massive festival, after all!
This year’s Milan Design Week program included some bubbles of escapism and relaxation, reflecting the consumers’ growing interest and need to feel well. Here is the selection of the 5 wellbeing concepts that have caught my attention.
RE:Charge Café, Humanscale
Designed by Todd Bracher, the RE:Charge café is the off-site hospitality venue for the American office furniture company Humanscale. The café opened in the busy Brera district with the goal to recharge the body and technology of the visitors showcasing the brand’s commitment to design innovation, health, and wellness at work.
Amongst other wellbeing oriented designed items, it features biological lighting that follows circadian rhythms, air-purifying walls, phone chargers, and healthy green food and drinks served all day long. And it is clearly a response to the need of recharging, given how stressful and demanding the design kermesse can be.
Why it’s interesting:
This concept shows that brands seem to prefer the ‘experiential flagship’ format to the obsolete ‘showroom,’ which would suit best in the realm of the fair Salone del Mobile in Rho. Combined with a healing foods & drinks offering, it attunes with the consumers that are into well-being– and attracts even those who aren’t.
RE:Charge Café. Photo Credit © Tom Mannion
Healing Hub, D/DOCK
The Healing Hub is a multifunctional space based on the Healing Offices concept, which revolves around humanized work environments. Set up in an industrial building in Ventura, it offers a future vision of workspace with a blend of design, technology, and wellbeing. I was there for a couple of hours, and for many visitors, it seemed like the perfect spot to do some work during the bustling days of Salone.
Healing Hub is shaped like a tribal village around the idea to work empathetically, collaborate, share, and have fun. With the contribution of several international designers and artists, the Healing Hub rotates around a communal area. It includes an ‘energy lounge’ to recharge with the help of light, sound, and scent. Like the concept of the breakout, there was also a ‘forum’ in a tepee shape for presentations. There’s also a ‘sensorama’, a relaxation area with a tatami and a massage mat. The ‘mind room’ offered a meditative VR experience, a journey through 7 rooms that symbolize human character traits.
Why it’s interesting:
Forget about conventional open-space, the office of the future is an experiential space which blends craftsmanship, technology, and wellbeing. If the Healing Hub sounds too good to be true, it’s been tested in some offices already.
The Healing Hub. Photo Credit © Veronica Fossa
The Two Martinas & recharge rooms, IKEA Festival
Every morning during the design week, Milan-based Martina Sergi and Martina Rando, best known as the yogini duo The Two Martinas, hosted a yoga session at the Ikea Festival.
Yoga isn’t the only wellbeing activity at the mini IKEA festival. Designed by stylists Anna Lenskog Belfrage and Pella Hedeby, recharge rooms was an installation that addressed the need of finding space for unwinding in the domestic place.
Why it’s interesting:
Yoga has become the most design-oriented discipline. It responds to consumers’ growing need to unwind and relax, even within compact spaces.
Ikea Festival, Photo Credits © Ikea
Sonic Pendulum, Yuri Suzuki & Audi
Alongside car brand Audi, Japanese designer Yuri Suzuki has designed Sonic Pendulum, a calming installation of 30 swinging pendulums set against the backdrop of an old Milanese seminary.
Each pendulum has a speaker that plays a relaxing ambient bassline. And, AI intelligence harmonizes the sounds that are being produced by the visitors in the closed spaces. Hence, the Pendulum creates an evolving soundscape that immerses people in a meditative state.
Why it’s interesting:
Sonic Pendulum offers a view of the relationship between human and artificial intelligence. This seems like the direction take some industries are taking.
Sonic Pendulum. Photo Credit © Yuri Suzuki
Entrainment: a sonic meditation, Teatro dell’Arte at La Triennale
The doors of the Teatro dell’Arte at La Triennale opens a bit before 11:30 AM to welcome the visitors to Entrainment: a sonic meditation, a transcendent 50-minute composition by the eclectic composer Ferdinando Arnò.
The performance guides the audience to a meditative headspace through a highly emotional composition of different musical influences. To set the mood before, we’re taking a comfortable sit on pillows graciously placed over the floor of the stage. And we start off by being invited to join in a performance of iconic avant-garde composer Pauline Olivero. Entrainment’s collaborative nature gives the audience the chance to be an active part of the creative process as well as offers a unique moment to retune with oneself.
Why it’s interesting:
The popularity of Entrainment shows that the design audience is ready for highly cultural and spiritual experiences.
Entrainment, Sonic Meditation. Photo Credit © Veronica Fossa
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