In Between - Milan Design Week 2026

There are moments during Milan Design Week when you realise you’re no longer just looking at things you’re moving through them, they are not just objects, nor installations, but transitions.

At the Cavallerizze, in the 5VIE district, inside the Leonardo da Vinci National Museum of Science and Technology, the entrance wasn’t simply marked it was something you had to cross: with Re-Campaign, Studio mo man tai transformed discarded advertising banners into a sequence of coloured portals. Materials once designed to be looked at from a distance at speed, were cut, reworked, and assembled into a tunnel you move through slowly. As you walk, colour shifts constantly. Layers overlap, fragments of past images appear and disappear, light filters through recycled surfaces. The structure extends beyond itself, casting grids and shadows that move with you. What was once image becomes space. What was once passive becomes physical.

You don’t just see it you enter it! That feeling stays with you.

It appears again, in a different form, at the Museo della Permanente, where Kia presents Cultural Vanguard: at first, it feels immersive waves of colour unfolding across the space, overlapping, dissolving, re-forming. But the longer you stay, the more the logic becomes visible: there is no colour, not really, only white light!

What we perceive as blues, magentas, greens, emerges through filtration and reflection. Surfaces intercept the light, divide it, recombine it building colour in space, moment by moment. A logic close to CMYK, but expanded into an environment. Two planes overlap, and a third colour appears. A shift in position, and it disappears again.

Nothing is fixed. Everything is relational, what feels immersive is not just the visual effect, but the awareness that perception itself is being constructed in real time.

Further along, In-Between Matter by Shimadzu Corporation and we+ moves even deeper into the presence, or absence, of matter itself: transparent vessels hold liquids that are almost invisible. You could look at them and not realise they are there, until they begin to move. As the containers rotate, the liquids different in density respond. Vortices form, spirals emerge, subtle distortions make their presence visible. What was imperceptible becomes legible, briefly, through motion. And then, as the rotation slows, everything dissolves again, the forms collapse. The surfaces quiet.

The liquids don’t disappear they simply return to a state where they can no longer be seen.

Nearby, ceramic tablets hold colour in a different way. Pigment is not applied, but absorbed diffused into the material, embedded within it. Each surface carries slight variations, like a trace of something that happened rather than something designed to be shown.

Nothing here is static. Everything depends on state!

That same attention to nuance appears in Coexist: TABLEWEARE by Shota Shimode: a series of wooden bowls, arranged across three shelves, reveals a progression so subtle it almost escapes notice. Dimensions shift slightly diameter, depth, curvature. The material changes just enough to alter weight, tone, presence. Each object is complete on its own. But together, they form a sequence a quiet study in variation.

You don’t read it instantly, you adjust to it.

With Lessons in Relations by TAKT Project, variation becomes a dialogue between natural processes and technology: the sculptures, produced through 3D printing, feel less designed than grown. Their forms seem guided by internal rules patterns of accumulation, erosion, balance. Each piece holds a logic that is both computational and organic, there is precision, but also unpredictability.

A kind of controlled emergence.

At Louis Vuitton’s Objets Nomades, the installation by Atelier Oï at the base of the staircase works through repetition and lightness: structured elements are layered until their rigidity softens. From one angle, it feels architectural. From another, almost textile something that could shift, expand, dissolve.

It doesn’t impose a fixed reading, it changes with movement.

And at Teatro Arsenale, the collection FLORALIS removes material altogether: laser and smoke define volumes that exist only temporarily. Boundaries appear, precise yet untouchable, and dissolve just as quickly. Space is drawn, but never held.

A structure made of light and air.

Across all these moments what emerges is not a shared aesthetic, but a shared attitude. A way of working that resists definition, that operates through transitions rather than conclusions. Between art and design, between material and perception, between control and unpredictability. Everything exists slightly in between, and maybe that’s why it resonates so deeply: because that’s also where our work begins.

Each piece starts with something precise: geometry, symmetry, intention. But it doesn’t exist fully on its own: it needs movement, it needs the body and it needs time, like those liquids: it reveals itself in transition. Not fixed. Not final.

Just… in between.