Once again, the Salone del Mobile.Milano prepares for the international limelight with its 56th Exhibition, which runs between Tuesday 4th and Sunday 9th April at the Fiera Milano Rho. The event confirms its place as the benchmark for quality and innovation thanks to the broad and comprehensive range of products on offer – from furniture and furnishings to lighting and workspaces – and two concomitant events, as well as its place as a forum for ideas.
As from 2015, the Salone dedicated to the workplace has taken on the new designation Workplace3.0, an innovative exhibition area devoted to design and technology in workspace planning, that confirms its new vocation as an exploration of brand-new approaches, forms and solutions to the workplace "of the future", in which the human factor and smart technologies have a vital role to play.
Workplace3.0 2017 will occupy 10,000 square metres of exhibition space and host 110 exhibiting companies working on solutions that dovetail with the new ways of working and the new design requisites for “inhabiting” the workspace.
The world of work is changing rapidly, along with the actual concept of work: new methods call for different workspaces. Workplace3.0, devoted to design and technology, is the best-equipped event to respond to this shift and to market demand. It showcases the finest products designed for procurement plans, reception areas and office spaces.
The Workplace3.0 pavilions will host A Joyful Sense at Work, an event/exhibit curated by Cristiana Cutrona first announced in 2016, giving form and life to the latest theories of office product and workspace design.
Nowadays offices, like cities, are defined as “smart”. It would be reductive, however, to put it all down to technology, smart is a new quality of life, a new humanism, in which man becomes the active protagonist. Guaranteeing spaces for individual working and for sharing is no longer enough, a new relationship based on trust (creative confidence) now needs to be activated, “trust&sharing”. A new cultural revolution is going on, visible yet dispersed in fragments, putting design at the service of humanity, in order to produce joy. An anthropocentric approach to design: antropodesign, meaning a form of thought language, a mental activity, a synthesis of intuition, imagination, invention, innovation, a sensory device.
“A Joyful Sense at Work” stems from a process of research, exchange and cooperation carried out by people from a range of disciplines and aims to delineate and lay down the foundations for a new approach to workplace design, reworking the theory of office and workspace planning.
These days, knowing how to read and listen to needs should be the keystones of design in which overturning the rules and the definition of a few simple variables can define the new workplace as an adaptive organism, less rigid and more capable of redesigning themselves instantly. A sustainable project is therefore one that satisfies the needs, the expectations and the rights of the individual. In this context, the designer becomes a mediator of needs, capable of designing complete and finished spaces, which, equally, are unfinished, adaptive and resilient.
“A Joyful Sense at Work” installation has served as the point of departure for the journey, a trailer that will lead us to SaloneUfficio 2017. The installation has been conceived as a compelling experiment with form and function that identifies us in a new way, different, with man at its centre and emotion first and foremost amongst its functions.
Offices are going through very challenging times. It is not just the products that are undergoing change, but the very way in which work and the workplace are being envisioned. It would be reductive these days to think about smart offices merely in terms of the developing technologies: “smart” is also a new quality of life, an anthropocentric approach to design, a new humanism and a cultural revolution that harnesses design for the needs of humanity in a bid to generate joy.
All this has sparked “A Joyful Sense at Work”, the installation commissioned by Assufficio and created by the architect Cristiana Cutrona, founder of the ReValue practice, and designer of some of the most outstanding examples of smart offices in Italy. Several other figures from the art world were involved in putting the installation together: Filippo Riniolo was responsible for the video installation, and Roberta Maddalena and Tommaso Melideo of Studio Quantica for the site-specific sculptures, with artistic direction from Francesco Cascino.