Within the new format of the Salone del Mobile, conceived by Stefano Boeri, curator of the “supersalone”, and Andrea Caputo, who designed the exhibition layout, there is also room for a large section dedicated to students and young designers. The Lost Graduation Show" occupies a large portion of Halls 2 and 4 at Rho Fiera, giving visibility to all those graduates who were unable to exhibit the results of their work in the last academic year. We refer to 170 designers from 48 schools in 22 different countries, selected through an open call to which almost 300 schools from 59 countries responded.

The projects are arranged on a modular, single-material display system: Ytong blocks in autoclaved aerated concrete supplied by Xella Italia. As with the rest of the exhibition set-up, once dismantled the installation will be completely returned to the building material production cycle.

“The Lost Graduation Show”, curated by Anniina Koivu, is a unique initiative in the long history of the fair, but the end result is a bit chaotic in both design and substance. 

First of all, those who walked through the corridors of the fair - between the stands of the companies - perceived the visual chaos generated by the succession of products, installations and brands, as well as the bustle of the (numerous) visitors. The intensity of visual stimuli is further intensified at “The Lost Graduation Show”, making it difficult to pay attention to the individual works, which are divided into islands but without any visual separation either from each other or from the rest of the fair.

The arrangement of the projects does not seem to follow a precise order. One after the other, we find social and political projects, experiments with materials and forms, 3D printed furniture or handcrafted furniture, made from waste elements or biomaterials...
The aim of the exhibition is to show the great variety of perspectives that design can have. But for a general public, already overexcited and distracted, there is a risk of having a folkloric effect: on the one hand there are the companies that make real design; on the other, young "creatives" with their bizarre ideas. Without an in-depth study, it is not easy to understand how these experiments can also be decisive in the world of industrial production, and to reason about their relevance in today's society. A grouping into categories would have been possible, perhaps also by reducing the number of categories and topics tackled.

We found it impossible to dissect the projects even if we tried to visit the 'digital platform' - which is a simple (and well organised) Instagram page. We tried to access it via the QR codes placed next to the captions, but each time the link took us to the first post in the feed: a black square. All we were left with to understand was a few lines of captioning.

Because of all this, although we have spent more than two hours looking at the projects, we have struggled to do in-depth analysis of them and cannot make a critical contribution to the individual pieces. However, here are 10 of them, which we hope you will find more of online.

After a month and a half of live streaming and digital magazines, was it really necessary to force us to search for designers and projects on Google?