Hosted By: Irene Pollini Giolai Milan Design Week, overproduction and disorientation

In these past two weeks you’ve probably been weaving through hundreds of guides telling you what’s unmissable, what to see, what’s in. I, if I can be honest, don’t know. I don’t know as I write this piece, and I won’t know even at the end of the week when this piece is published. Not out of lack of interest - I know - because in recent years my experience has always been the same: too much noise, too much stuff, too many opinions. I feel overwhelmed before I even begin. A constant horizon of events, installations, openings, invitations and then, lines lines lines. People everywhere, buzzing, you can feel the FOMO on your skin and smell it in the air.

The Milano Design Week has a density that seems to compress space and distort it, forcing you into a perpetual motion of seven days in which - to see everything you “should” see - you must not work, have a life, not even sleep. You survive on olives and lukewarm prosecco, while you accumulate images, encounters, impressions. But the feeling is always the same: not really being able to choose. And above all there’s no time to understand what you’re looking at, even when you do choose: the experience is shaped more by flows than by attention.

If for some Design Week is a perfect machine, it is also an ecosystem that is increasingly difficult to inhabit consciously. It divides the public between enthusiasts and the perplexed, but still forces them into the same condition: that of rapid consumption, hit-and-run, of experiences.

To understand how we got here, we need to take a step back: