Et voilà le Salon!

Design Academy Eindhoven: Hikaru Imamura
Even if design isn't going to save the world, a close connection with everyday reality and "a strong desire to give it meaning" are requisites that a good designer ought not to disdain. This is the belief of students at Design Academy Eindhoven, with their 50 recent degree and master's projects, applied to everyday situations but also to emergency contexts. The works on display stood out for their sense of irony and pragmatism. The Japanese designer Hikaru Imamura, for example, created the Novel Hospital Toys series to tell patients aged from three to six how complex diagnostic tests work (such as x-rays, cat scans and electrocardiograms). She also designed Heat Rescue, a barrel equipped with water, food and the essentials for sterilising and cooking, which in urgent situations is transformed into an indispensable source of heat. ES

La Rinascente / Hacked: Dominic Wilcox
This was the Salone of digital fabrication: from Tom Dixon's robotic chair factory to Domus's own exhibition at Palazzo Clerici, 3D printers and rapid manufacturing experiments were an inescapable presence throughout the Fuorisalone. At Hacked, a five-day programme of events and performances in the basement level of La Rinascente department store curated by Beatrice Galilee, a little cold water was poured over the collective 3D printing hype: British designer Dominic Wilcox challenged Deep Pink, a Makerbot 3D printer carefully tuned for the occasion by the WeFab Italia team, to a race to manufacture a scale model of Milan's Duomo. Unlike the faceoff between Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov, man prevailed — for this year, at least — against machine. JG

Subalterno1: Francesco Faccin, Paolo Ulian
Conceived, organised and mounted in less than two months, the Analogico/ Digitale exhibition curated by Stefano Maffei and Stefano Micelli at the Galleria Subalterno1 presented the results of a fruitful collaboration between seven designers, seven artisan enterprises and a maker facility. PaneLuce by Francesco Faccin (with Galbiati Natale & Figli) is a hybrid table centrepiece that springs from the combination of a bread basket and a candlestick. Introverso by Paolo Ulian (with Vallmar) is a thin, pre-cut vase-volume that users can personalise thanks to its accompanying hammer. The exhibition was a small but important steps towards understanding what the future holds for the thousands of micro-enterprises that operate throughout Northern Italy. A combination of artisan know-how, new digital manufacturing technologies and design culture could open up new prospects. ES

Luceplan: Francisco Gomez Paz
Industrial designer Francisco Gomez Paz has replicated nature's evolutionary process in the creation Nothing, his latest led lamp for Luceplan that was preceded by over 100 prototypes. The result of a three-year research project on the nature of led lighting (described in the Connecting the Dots installation), the lamp is an extruded circuit board filled with 4 x 4 mm leds, in which Gomez Paz has expertly carved a series of laser cuts to create a thin, organic net that resembles a goldsmith's intricate creation ("A cloud of triangles in aluminium tubes and elements in stereolithography"). Its delicate appearance practically allows the lamp to disappear when in use: released from any given surface, the leds are left to shine, with the light diffused in a soft, non-intrusive way. Nothing is but a shadow. VS

Booo Studio / Spazio Rossana Orlandi: Nacho Carbonell
Proof that there is still a will to invest in experimentation comes from The Netherlands and the new Booo Studio brand. Booo tasked three of today's most interesting designers — Front, Formafantasma and the Spaniard Nacho Carbonell — to change the traditional idea of light bulb, starting from the led. Carbonell — whose studio has been based in Eindhoven for some time — chose rubber because it is a durable material, just like leds, but also because its form can be easily changed and it can be transported without risk of breakage. Functional and formal considerations merge with concepts that are closer to the emotive sphere. "I like to see objects as living organisms, imagining them coming alive and being able to surprise you with their behaviour. I want to create objects with my hands, then I can give them my personality". LM

Dutch Invertuals: Mieke Meijer
The subject of fragility was at the centre of the exhibition by the Dutch Invertuals collective, founded by Wendy Plomp by rallying together designers who trained at Design Academy Eindhoven. Each of the 11 talents who took part in Untouchables Retouched represented the vulnerability of society. Mieke Meijer presented a lamp called Balance that only switches on when its two component sticks are in the right position. A small brass plate resting on wood acts as an electrical conductor and turns on the leds hidden in the horizontal stick. A brightly coloured electric wire is the only connection between its two main elements and also serves to create its equilibrium. "The desire to use this lamp must be stronger than the fear of upsetting its balance," says the designer. This notion brings us back to the subject of the exhibition, while also offering points of departure for wider reflection. LM

La Chance / MOST: Pierre Favresse
La Chance, a new Parisian label making its debut in Milan, caused quite a stir for more than one reason. Firstly, the combined ages of its young founders Jean- Baptiste Souletie and Louise Breguet, an economist and architect respectively, total just 55 years. The collection, completed in a mere 18 months' work, includes lamps, tables, sofas, mirrors and carpets, by 14 young international designers who are currently enjoying the limelight, brought together in the enchanting Train Room at the Museum of Science and Technology. "We asked the designers to think of sophisticated objects, but not contrary, we wanted them to transform it into a decorative element," explains Souletie. One example is the Magnum table by Pierre Favresse where the legs (in marble or wood) and the solid wood top do not touch each other, but are connected by a thin metal net. ES

Appartamento Lago: Daniele Lago
Daniele Lago is in his Appartamento — a unique showroom animated and used during the Furniture Fair by cooks, musicians and artists — with one of his latest projects: the Joynt chair, designed by Harry Owen together with Lagostudio. A rubber joint integrated into the wooden frame causes the backrest to bend according to the sitter's movements. The product is the outcome of a combined project by young creative talents (selected through a competition open to students of design, architecture and art schools worldwide) and the company's R&D department. For five years Lago have been developing the prototyping, production and marketing of the most interesting designs created by Lagostudio. Now they are thinking of making this ideas workshop available to other off-sector companies too, which will be able to commission research and develop projects. LM

B&B Italia: Barber & Osgerby
Following a series of successful designs for Vitra and the London Olympics, during the Furniture Fair the British studio Barber & Osgerby unveiled their first collaboration with B&B Italia. Tobi-Ishi is a sculptural round table, a typology absent from the brand's catalogue in recent years, emulating in shape and colour the stepping stones dotting Japanese gardens in a half-decorative, half-practical way. Three dark, massive volumes—a tabletop supported by two planes—stand with poise in what seems to be a precarious balance, appearing to shift when viewed from different angles. Barber & Osgerby bring density to the sculptural shape with an imperfect, tactile finish, covering the wooden tabletop and polyurethane legs with concrete grout spread by hand, thus adding an artisan touch to an industrial product. VS