After having long stood as one of the generative epicentres of Milan’s Fuorisalone, Superstudio reaffirms its leading role with Superstudio Design 2026, a project that marks a significant shift in how Milan Design Week is experienced. Now in its 26th edition, the initiative moves beyond the district logic, outlining a new, distributed geography across the city: three venues, three thematic paths, three complementary visions of contemporary design. Spanning 30,000 square metres across Superstudio Più (Tortona), Superstudio Maxi (Barona), and Superstudio Village (Bovisa), the platform brings together 70 projects, 91 brands, and 88 designers from 19 countries, reinforcing its global and multicultural scope.

Starting from the historic core of Superstudio Più, the soul of the Tortona district, SuperNova emerges as the project’s international hub: an immersive stage of large-scale installations, independent pavilions, and temporary architectures where technology, history, and design culture intersect. The return of Moooi takes centre stage with “Moooi 25 and Promising,” a museum-scale exhibition curated by Marcel Wanders that celebrates the brand’s 25-year journey through a dialogue between memory and future. Lexus, Samsung Electronics, and next125 explore new relationships between design, innovation, and perception, from the car as an emotional space to the human dimension of technology, and sculptural research inspired by origami. The programme is further enriched by international contributions, including the “houses of the heart” by Design Association with figures such as Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, and Sou Fujimoto; a bistro designed by Paola Navone-Otto Studio; and a layered dialogue between art and design, from the authorial reflective pieces of “Mirrors” to the rooftop activation Re:Circle.

In Barona, within the spaces of Superstudio Maxi, SuperCity – curated by Giulio Cappellini – unfolds as an ideal city where design, art, and architecture converge into a unified narrative. Visitors encounter an open, continuous landscape, free of physical partitions, where domestic and outdoor environments flow into one another within a shared spatial device. At its core lies “The City,” a vision of living grounded in calm and the quality of shared space, shaped through contributions from leading Italian design brands, from Cassina to Moroso, from Living Divani to Zanotta, alongside the theatre signed by Abet Laminati. Alongside it, “When Design Becomes Art” investigates the boundary between function and artwork, while “Portraits – photography | design” reframes iconic objects through a photographic lens. A programme of masterclasses and international talks – featuring figures such as Carlo Ratti, Cino Zucchi, and Giulio Iacchetti –completes a trajectory that reflects on the future of the city, between technology, nature, and new relational models.

At the other end of a transforming Milan, the major new addition is Superstudio Village, a regenerated space hosting SuperPlayground, a project poised between emerging creativity and social design. Here, design becomes an open, collective process, articulated through diverse forms of research and expression. It begins with the work of 33 designers from over 17 countries, selected through an open call, and extends vertically into a 15-metre-high space inhabited by decommissioned hot-air balloons, transformed by Slovak artist Lousy Auber into an inhabitable environment carrying a simple, meaningful message: “Keep your bubble”. The Turin-born format Graphic Days then takes over one of the Village’s buildings, activating it through a hybrid presence that moves between exhibition, multisensory installation, and shared printmaking workshop. True to its name, SuperPlayground shifts register over the course of the day: workshops and talks animate the daytime programme, while music and performances take over in the evening. The result is a contemporary agora that articulates a vision for design’s role within an evolving city, not merely as a tool of production, but as a unifying agent capable of shaping the social relationships that define the future.

Opening image: Lousy Auber, Keep your bubble, SuperPlayground. Photo RIccardo Diotallevi