Tortona Design Week is an innovative event in Milan, in the via Savona – via Tortona area. It is a project based on coordination and communication and the aim is giving a governance to the area, valuing its content, giving it the best accessibility.

Tortona Design Week caters to an international audience of design professionals and design enthusiasts, who care about quality and are always looking for the newest trend and, in the past years, the results has been impressive.

TDW is a side event to Salone Internazionale del Mobile. This third edition is scheduled for April 9th to 14th, 2013, and will be coordinated by Associazione Tortona Area Lab.

The stage of this great event is post-industrial area behind Porta Genova train station, a half-square kilometre area lined with industrial buildings, small former workshops turned into design studios, photo studios, location for events, etc.

The event animates nights and days: on daytime professionals gather for their business, at night, the younger crowd looks for entertainment.

Tortona Design Week  focuses on designers and exhibiting companies and among them we have some really important and talented ones such as Nichetto = nendo.

Luca Nichetto and Oki Sato were introduced to each other in 2012 during Tokyo Design Week [LINK 6]. They spoke about design and collaboration between designers of the past and between jokes, they thought about working together .

So, Oki started working on some creative process of Japanese culture,  and started writing ‘tanka’, a genre of japanese poetry in which person composes the first three lines (kami no ku) of the prose, and then sent them to Luca Nichetto, so he could complete the final two lines (shimo no ku) of the composition. All of this was done in few days and the result was seven co-designed and co-concieved products.

Designboom spoke with the young designers and asked them what sparked the project and the pieces they ended up developing .

Another amazing but completely different project that is going to be shown at Tortona Design Week is the “Polish Projects”, a compilation of some of the best examples of designs from Poland.

A dozen of Polish designers, firms and design collectives who create unique and universal objects will present themselves at this fair. The most interesting names include Aleksandra Gaca, Maria Jeglińska, Kosmos Project , Kristoff, Lorens, Malafor, Mamsam, Baskho Trybek as well as Zieta Prozessdesign.

“In the last decades, Poland has positioned itself as a manufacturer of furniture that is mainly exported to the West,” say the team behind Polish Innovation in Milan, one of the six exhibitions presented at the Salone.

Another renown artist  that is going to be represented at the TDW is Tessa Koot with her project “Tropical dreams”.

This is a strange cocktail – think « Maarten Baas meets Miami Bling »… Tessa Koot , an Eindhoven-based designer, says she doesn’t mind her Design-aesthetic resembling « an 80’s haircut, very out and prout, but not all that resistant against the ravages of time ».

Organic shapes and angles, wood and marble, her « Tropical dreams » collection include seats, lamps, sculptured pieces. The uncanny She’s a tiger cabinet displays a very Art deco bas-relief in the style of George-Laurent Saupique, whereas the Little slave girl dreaming, perched on the  dressing table, strangely echoes artifacts from the 1931 « Exposition coloniale internationale »

Have a look on The Temporary Museum, that is also going to be held during the Milan Design Week.

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