Milan 2018

Value For Money

With a pharmacy, hardware store, newspaper kiosk, church, food market, Internet café and osteria, Via Crespi represents a slice of everyday Italian life, a stone’s throw from the Stazione Centrale di Milano. Here, day in, day out, people come to buy their newspaper, grab an espresso, shop for food, get a haircut. At first sight, we observe a thriving system of exchange. A micro-society designed around transactions of goods, services, and currency. A co-existence of inhabitants and visitors of various ages, cultures and professions, traveling up and down the street within a grid of set rules and values.
Priceless Design

Yet against this burgeoning background, the street’s inhabitants have developed a deep-rooted culture of ingenuity, creativity and idiosyncrasy. Underneath the tangible market dynamics, each venue boasts its own curiosities: locals have pasta competitions inside Carmen’s shop, dance in the aisles of food market, and proudly display their collections of baseball caps or T-shirts — not for sale. Design provides us with the building blocks of society — commodities such as a plate of pasta, the newspaper, the screwdriver, the coffee pot. It is how these things come together, though, that makes a place what it is.
A Street-long Installation

This year’s DAE presentation merges organically with the street’s fabric, spanning from the former Osteria Crespi, revived by the Design Academy for the Salone del Mobile, through the famous covered market, Mercato Comunale Monza, to Piazza Morbegno, with its hardware store and newspaper kiosk. The street-long installation explores design along a spectrum from the banal to the avant-garde, from the amateur to the professional, from the market stall to the street performer.
Future Urban Visions

Graduates from each of the Design Academy’s eight bachelor’s departments and four master’s departments propose stimulating site-specific design projects. At Osteria Crespi, Martina Huynh’s Basic Income Café explores different economic scenarios through the flow of coffee. Further down the street in the Mercato Comunale, you are served a freshly brewed drink by SAM, a self-owning soda-making machine by Marie Caye and Arvid Jense, while one block down at NoLoSo bar, the displaced human worker performs The Last Job on Earth. In the Anaesthesia nightclub, Donghwan Kam’s After-Photography freezes time, re-entering iconic moments in photojournalism through the virtual reality of Second Life, while Théophile Blandet’s Fountain of Money speeds up the flow of data to mine cryptocurrency. And these are only a few of the twelve installations to be discovered by adventurous visitors to Not for sale.