Design for everyone, at the SaloneSatellite

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SaloneSatellite Award 2022, ph.Luca Quagliato

Inclusivity, sustainability, slow living and slow production are the center of the thinking of the designers who are planning our tomorrows

Design for our Future Selves is the title that is bringing together 600 young designers in pavilions 1 and 3 of the Salone del Mobile.Milano 2022 to recount all the opportunities that design offers to cope with the challenges – great and small - awaiting us in the future. The SaloneSatellite is showcasing the most experimental, independent and advanced projects by young designers (all strictly under 35) and the results of the work of academies, schools, universities and laboratories around the world.

Among the objects featured in the booths of the SaloneSatellite you will be able to preview the forms of the future, in which an increasingly inclusive society will make provision for the most varied needs, coming to terms with the urgent themes of contemporary life: the aging of the population, the massive extraction of resources, pollution, the progressive increase in temperatures and the growth of mental health disorders - with all the myriad facets evident in the present.

Above all, what the projects at the SaloneSatellite bring out clearly is that these future factors concern us all. The Cinzia and Victory chairs by Andrea Maggiarra, for instance, show how combining discreet technical devices with careful design makes it possible to create an elegant object meant to be used also by the elderly and disabled (who often need to rest their weight on their arms rather than their legs to get up from the sitting position), while avoiding that typical sanitary-aesthetic appearance we are accustomed to.

Then the RemX Walker project by Lani Adeoye - winner of the SaloneSatellite Award 2022 - is an asymmetrical walking frame with organic forms and neutral colors, handcrafted as a slender domestic sculpture consisting of two lightly intersecting curves.

Even the multifunctional walking sticks developed by Unibz students effectively show all the variations on the theme that can be imagined for a seemingly commonplace product: sticks for carrying objects, for fitness, for couples, for gardening, for carrying groceries and even for playing. Products that look at the contemporary make-up of our society and meet its needs, in a very near future and close to everyone's daily experiences.

And there’s much more. At the SaloneSatellite the objects also speak of the ravaged environment, critical manufacturing chains and lack of respect for the resources that the consumer culture has generated. So design, which in the last century was a driving force behind this anti-holistic culture of consumption and manufacture, today becomes the principal key to interpreting our approach to material production in new and more optimistic ways.