“The star of Milan this year was Instagram”

Opinion: the photo-sharing site set the agenda at this year’s Milan design week and hints at how technology will transform the way we experience the world, says Marcus Fairs, who also shares a selection of his own Instagram images from the week (+ slideshow).


I was attending a talk in Milan the other day and I noticed that one of the panelists was far more interested in his iPhone than the discussion. The girl sitting next to me in the audience was similarly preoccupied. Then I realised what was going on: the guy was Instagramming a picture of the girl, who had just Instagrammed one of him.

For me, the star of Milan this year was Instagram. It was the lens though which I experienced the week: it was a kind of parallel digital version of my real-world experience.

Instagram is how I kept up with what friends were doing in Milan, and was a key source of research for what I should see. It’s how I found out about the things I’d missed. I know plenty of other people who said the same.

It was my preferred method of documenting my own experiences at the fair this year. And when a journalist from La Repubblica called to interview me about my Salone highlights, her first question was “What was your favourite Instagram moment?”

Instagram is how I found out that Massimo Morozzi had died. A few years ago news like that would have spread on Twitter, but this year the design cognoscenti have switched to the photo-sharing service.

An Instagrammed Milan is very different from a tweeted Milan. Twitter helps news and gossip to spread like wildfire; it’s a verbal medium that encourages debate. During the Salone del Mobile in 2011, journalists converged on Twitter to share information and opinions on the dark side of the industry, creating the biggest talking point of the week that year.

But Instagram is a purely visual medium that does not criticise but instead, through its filtered trickery, burnishes. It’s not a surprise that designers, who collectively aspire to create a more beautiful world (and were largely silent during the 2011 twitterstorm), have embraced it too.

Dinner at Spazio Rosanna Orlandi
Dinner at Spazzio Rosanna Orlandi

This wasn’t a vintage Salone in terms of talking points and there appeared to be little consensus among Intagrammers as to the outstanding shows. Rather the city itself – and particularly its more photogenic venues – became the stars. The breezily atmospheric Palazzo Clerici in Brera; the eccentric Spazio Rosanna Orlandi; the breathtaking Villa Necchi Campiglio; the charming pop-up street cafes and garden bars in Ventura Lambrate; the surreal Fornasetti house. Under a benevolent sun, it felt more like a sprawling lifestyle festival than a design fair.

Instagram feeds are highly personal, highly curated visual diaries of an individual’s aesthetic interaction with a place. The filters and cropping tools allow you to achieve visual perfection within a little square frame, creating an idealised world free of the clutter and noise of the real world.

My own Milan Instagram diary is low on design but high on portraits of people I’ve met, dinners I’ve attended and incidental tableaux from my meanderings around the city. Trawling through my feed will no doubt strongly influence my memories of the week. It’s an airbrushed digital travelogue that paints both the city and my interaction with it in a flattering light.

Instagram is a powerful arbiter of taste because it favours certain aesthetic experiences over others. It likes a strong, colourful form against a plain background; it loves translucency and diffraction; it adores sunsets. I wouldn’t be surprised if brands soon start to rethink their presentation strategies to enhance the Instagrammability of their stands.

Nao Tamura at Lexus Design Amazing
Interconnections by Nao Tamura at Lexus Design Amazing

Instagram also favours eclecticism: a typical fairgoer’s feed will feature a product followed by a selfie followed by a street scene followed by their lunch. Design has existed in a bubble of its own for decades: to walk round a design fair or flick through a design magazine is to see an aesthetic monoculture. But Instagram reveals how the design world intersects with other realities, and shows them to be just as beautiful.

Instagram is just a foretaste of the way we will use digital technology to experience events like the Salone del Mobile in future. Capturing technologies like 360-degree video – which records everything in all directions – allows the creation of convincing digital replicas of physical spaces.

And display technologies like Google Glass, augmented reality and virtual reality mean that we will be able to access additional layers of information as we move around an event, or even experience it without being there. One day the Salone del Mobile could be hosted in a huge server farm, accessible only through a virtual reality headset.

These technologies also allow users to inhabit enhanced, personalised worlds – or entirely artificial worlds – that can be designed around their preferences, edited on the move, Instagram-style, and filed for future enjoyment. Bored by the colour of your kitchen? Use a real-time filter to change it. Walk to work too drab? Brighten it up, adjust the contrast, cut and paste some sights from your last holiday.

To an extent we already inhabit a parallel space: time spent on Instagram, Twitter or other social media is time spent in a virtual community rather than the real world. The cliche of the person so entranced by their iPhone that they notice nothing of their physical surroundings is just the beginning of the migration towards parallel digital worlds that are as convincing as the real one.

Somebody will have to design these worlds but it is astonishing how little attention designers and the design industry is paying to this potential. In Milan this year only Moooi dared dip their toes into the water, presenting an online 360-degree digital walkthrough that allowed people who were not in the city to experience their show.

Elsewhere, Joseph Grima’s FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) project harvested images from Instagram, reactions from Twitter and combined them with robot-generated transcripts of discussions. It treated the fair as a giant data-generating event and used algorithms instead of journalists to decide what to publish.

Download the first experiment in algorithmic publishing direct from Milan
An excerpt from one of the FOMO publications

Apart from those two examples, and a smattering of other projects, this year’s fair was largely a tech-free zone. The lack of innovative uses of technology at the fair was the elephant in the room. This is an extraordinary missed opportunity for an industry that needs to embrace technology if it is to have a future.

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Dezeen’s Marcus Fairs named one of UK’s top 100 creatives

News: Dezeen founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs has been named in the Hospital Club 100 list of the most influential people in the UK’s media and creative industries.

At a ceremony last night, London private members’ club and arts venue The Hospital Club revealed the 100-strong list, which includes figures including David Bowie and fashion model Cara Delevigne.

The Hospital Club 100 is “the Hospital Club’s annual search for the most influential, innovative and interesting people in the creative and media industries.” The list is decided by a panel of industry experts and combined with online votes from members of the public.

This year the list was compiled in association with The Guardian Culture Professionals Network, which offers creative advice, ideas and connections.

Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs

Winners were chosen from a shortlist of 300 nominees in ten categories: theatre and performance, publishing and writing, art and design, creative entrepreneurship, gaming and tech, music, broadcast, film, fashion and advertising, marketing and PR.

Fairs was announced as one of ten creatives in the art and design category. Others who made the list in other categories include actors Eddie Redmayne, Steve Coogan and Idris Elba, musicians The Rolling Stones and Laura Mvula.

Last week Fairs was awarded Business Web Editor of the Year by the British Society of Magazine Editors.

He is shortlisted in the Multi-Media Journalist category at the International Building Press (IBP) awards to be revealed on Thursday, while Dezeen is in with a chance of scooping the Digital Service prize.

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“The future is a small, ugly town in the south of Holland”

Marcus Fairs' Opinion column about Eindhoven following Dutch Design Week

Opinion: on his return from Dutch Design Week, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs argues that “something special is happening” in Eindhoven, a dowdy post-industrial sprawl that was recently named “the most inventive city in the world”.


I’ve seen the future and it’s a small, ugly town in the south of Holland.

I’ve been in Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week for the past few days and the energy, creativity and imagination I’ve come across has been a revelation. Not only designers but entrepreneurs, civic leaders, restauranteurs and musicians are buzzing with an excitement and optimism that is both rare and genuine. They feel something special is happening in their city.

The trip is part of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour and even though this is the smallest and least attractive of the cities we’ve visited this year – other stops have included New York, Singapore and London – it’s been by far the most interesting.

“The potential of what is here is just starting to come out,” says designer Miriam van der Lubbe in our first MINI World Tour report from the city. “And there’s so much more that can happen here”.

I’m by no means the first person to notice that there’s something going on in Eindhoven. In 2011 the city was named the world’s most Intelligent Community of the Year by the Intelligent Community Forum. In July this year, Forbes magazine named Eindhoven as “hands-down the most inventive city in the world”.

That accolade was based on research by the OECD, which found that the area leads the world in “patent intensity” – the number of patent applications per capita – a recognised way of measuring innovation. Eindhoven files 22.6 patents for every 10,000 people. San Diego, which is second on the list, files only 8.9.

It’s an incredible turnaround for a city that, in the eighties, feared it was staring into the abyss when Philips, the electronics giant that was the dominant economic and social force in Eindhoven, as good as abandoned the city with the loss of 30,000 jobs (out of a total population of around 200,000). Things were so bad the city seriously considered changing its name – “eind” is Dutch for “end” – lest people take it too literally.

Fearing the fate of Manchester, where the loss of heavy industry blighted the city centre for years, Eindhoven moved quickly to reinvent itself, giving abandoned Philips buildings to creative people who, true to the local spirit of hard work and cooperation, self organised and got on with building their own future.

Local authorities and developers around the world now commonly use such “creative seeding” to add buzz to an area to aid gentrification (and ultimately sell real estate) but in Eindhoven there appears to be a more equitable social construct to the way this is carried out.

Annemoon Geurts, the founder of Kazerne, a new creative industries hub in a former barracks in the city centre, told me that the city had offered her non-profit organisation an “erfpacht”, or social lease, on the building, meaning it would benefit from the value they added during their tenure. And with a 40-year lease, something that would be unheard of in short-term, money-grubbing London, they have an incentive to make long-term improvements.

Eindhoven’s design credentials are well known. Dutch Design Week (unofficial slogan: “What you see here today is what you’ll see in Milan in two years”) is one of the best curated and most vibrant design weeks. Design Academy Eindhoven is a serious contender for the title of world’s best design school and an increasing number of its stellar alumni (Piet Hein Eek, Kiki van Eijk, Joost van Bleiswijk and Formafantasma to name just a few) have remained in the city, running thriving studios.

But designers on their own can’t achieve much; if they aspire to more than just being another wannabe on the design-fair circuit they need an infrastructure of industry, R&D and other creative disciplines around them with whom they can make bigger ripples.

And Eindhoven has these in abundance. ASML, the world’s biggest semiconductor manufacturer, is based in Eindhoven. A drive through even the dullest industrial estate in the city reveals companies specialising in cryogenics, photovoltaics and biotechnology. RPI Paro, the advanced print-on-demand printing facility that produced our Print Shift magazine, is based in Eindhoven. So is Shapeways, one of the leading 3D printing companies, who we interviewed for the Print Shift project.

In fact many of the world’s leading 3D-printing companies are clustered in what is known as the high-tech Eindhoven-Leuven-Aachen-Triangle (ELAt), as we discovered when we visited the region earlier this year. Here, high-tech, knowledge-based industries account for 20% of GDP.

These complimentary sectors tend to open their doors to creative minds, rather than turning them away, ripping them off or viewing them with suspicion, as is the common experience other cities including London. Designers in the city talk of an openness towards new ideas and a willingness to experiment that permeates industry, academia and the city government itself.

The procurement of Eindhoven’s new corporate identity expresses this collaborative spirit: rather than go to a safe-pair-of-hands graphic designer, the city assembled a “Virtual Design Studio” of ten different creative businesses to figure it out.

Interdisciplinary collaboration – so often an empty cliche – appears to be an everyday reality in Eindhoven and they even have a special term for it. Proeftuin, which literally means “experimental garden” or “test bed”, is a form of collaborative working between people of different disciplines that has been adopted by the city. Proeftuin was used to generate the city’s (alas, unsuccessful) bid strategy for European City of Culture 2018 and would also have formed a key part of cultural activity in 2018, had it won.

It almost seems to be a precondition for designers exhibiting at Dutch Design Week that their projects display meaningful (rather than PR-driven) collaboration with a university research department, an online platform or even a multinational brand.

The attitude is most perfectly encapsulated by Dutch Design Week ambassador Daan Roosegaarde’s concept for removing smog from urban skies using an “electronic vacuum cleaner”, which he revealed in Eindhoven this week. Here a designer, researchers and politicians came together to address a real problem and found that between them they had the ingredients to do something about it.

In this case Eindhoven cannot claim these elements as its own: Roosegaarde is based near Rotterdam; the university is in Delft and the politicians are in Beijing. But Eindhoven can stake a convincing claim to the spirit, and that spirit offers a bright future.

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Competition: five copies of 21st Century Design to be won

21st Century Design updated by Marcus Fairs

Competition: Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs has updated his book full of the best designs from the 21st century and we’re giving away five copies to readers before the official release.

21st Century Design updated by Marcus Fairs

The compendium is packed with innovative and experimental projects undertaken or completed this side of the millennium.

21st Century Design updated by Marcus Fairs

Fairs first compiled 21st Century Design in 2006 to feature everything from iconic architecture, such as Foster + Partners’ “Gherkin” tower in London, to stylish mass-produced furniture – see a selection of extracts here.

21st Century Design updated by Marcus Fairs

The latest revision, the book’s third edition, includes designs that utilise emerging 3D printing technologies and newly completed buildings like London’s The Shard by Renzo Piano.

21st Century Design updated by Marcus Fairs

21st Century Design is published by Carlton Books and designed by Mabel Chan, with a foreword written by Dutch designer Marcel Wanders.

21st Century Design updated by Marcus Fairs

It can be purchased from the Carlton Books website and other online stockists, plus bookstores worldwide from 10 October.

21st Century Design updated by Marcus Fairs

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “21st Century Design third edition” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.

You need to subscribe to our newsletter to have a chance of winning. Sign up here.

21st Century Design updated by Marcus Fairs

Competition closes 24 September 2013. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

21st Century Design updated by Marcus Fairs

See more architecture and design books »

21st Century Design updated by Marcus Fairs

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"Why wouldn’t a contemporary museum use eBay?"

"Why wouldn't a contemporary museum use eBay?"

Opinion: in this week’s column, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs wonders why London’s Design Museum is so reluctant to talk about money, arguing that design classics “aren’t theoretical exercises but sophisticated appeals to the wallet.”


I’ve spent much of last week ignoring phone calls and emails from news reporters. Architecture weekly Building Design and London daily the Evening Standard were both desperate to confirm that the Design Museum in London used eBay to source items for its permanent collection; the museum refused to comment so all that was standing between the tabloids and a sensational scoop was my indiscretion.

This inconsequential media frenzy started when I blithely mentioned on Twitter that the museum was scouring the online auction site for design classics for its newly assembled collection, which went on permanent display for the first time this week in an exhibition titled Extraordinary Stories about Ordinary Things.

This seemed logical: why wouldn’t a contemporary museum use a popular and reliable bartering platform instead of (or as well as) more traditional procurement avenues such as auction houses, galleries and bequests?

If it was odd that reporters thought this was newsworthy, it was equally strange that the Design Museum wouldn’t admit it was true. The museum’s exhibition title declares that the items in question are “ordinary things” – and the internet is the obvious place to buy such goods.

If you or I wanted to buy nappies or a Kindle  – both of which are included in the collection’s 3000-strong inventory – there’s a very good chance we’d turn to Amazon. Yet the Design Museum’s press release obliquely references objects that have been “added to” the collection, rather than “ordered online”.

Even items such as the Tulip chair, the Valentine typewriter and the red K2 telephone box, while not being household items for most of us, are today available on eBay for £180, £399 and £5,800 respectively. They’re not rare and precious artworks; they’re mass-produced consumables being openly traded in a secondary market.

In short, normal people go shopping, but design institutions seem obliged to avoid such crude inferences of lowly commerce. They must instead “collect” and “acquire”.

The texts accompanying the Design Museum’s exhibits avoid any suggestion of money changing hands, not only in their acquisition but in their development and everyday use. The “extraordinary stories” include explaining how design can “create a sense of identity” and “communicate clearly” but never “sell more products”.

The story of the development of the London 2012 logo tells how “for the first time in the history of the Games, the Olympics and Paralympics embraced the same logo,” according to the exhibition press release. “The logo was created to be a ‘design for everybody’ – the exhibition will reveal the design process and thinking behind this symbol of Britain as a world stage and allow audiences to interact with it.” Not a word about how the logo was a vital money-spinner for the games, crucial to securing sponsorship deals and shifting merchandise.

Even the purpose of money itself is disguised by selective rhetoric: the pound coin is “a strong symbol of Britain” rather than a quotidian trading token while the design for the new Euro notes had to “work on many levels” including making EU nations feel properly represented, making fakery difficult and being “easily distinguishable for the visually impaired”. Hang on, what about being convenient for shopping?

It seems curious to cast design as an altruistic social service and ignore its parallel commercial purpose: most of the items in the collection were created to be sold. The form and function of a Tizio lamp or a Myto chair aren’t theoretical exercises but sophisticated appeals to the wallet.

Of course many famous design classics have been comprehensive failures in a business sense, which makes for even better “extraordinary stories”, but ones that are similarly too rarely told. This tendency to airbrush out design’s commercial narrative is not confined to the Design Museum; it’s a strangely common position among the institutional elite. Business is considered dirty while creativity is seen as untainted.

But one of the reasons I’m interested in design is that it perfectly straddles both culture and commerce. They keep each other grounded. To ignore one in favour of the other is to tell stories that are not extraordinary, but curiously incomplete.


Extraordinary Stories about Ordinary Things is at the Design Museum in London until 4 January 2015.

More opinion on Dezeen: read an introduction to Dezeen Opinion in which Marcus Fairs explains why it’s taken so long for us to take a stance and Sam Jacob’s first opinion column about how sites like Dezeen are affecting design culture.

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Dezeen Screen: Dezeen Space at 54 Rivington Street

Dezeen Space at 54 Rivington Street

Dezeen Screen: in this movie filmed at 54 Rivington Street, London, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs gives a tour of our activities at Dezeen Space. Watch the movie »

Competition! Five copies of Twenty-First Century Design by Marcus Fairs to be won

Competition! Five copies of Twenty-First Century Design by Marcus Fairs to be won

We’re offering readers the chance to win one of five copies of the new paperback edition of Twenty-First Century Design by Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs.

Competition! Five copies of Twenty-First Century Design by Marcus Fairs to be won

The 463-page book includes a foreword by Dutch designer Marcel Wanders and features over 230 designs across the fields of architecture, interiors, furniture, lighting, homeware, products, clothing and accessories, visual communication and urban landscape.

Competition! Five copies of Twenty-First Century Design by Marcus Fairs to be won

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Twenty-First Century Design paperback” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers.

Read our privacy policy here.

Competition! Five copies of Twenty-First Century Design by Marcus Fairs to be won

Competition closes 10 May 2011. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the bottom of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

Subscribe to our newsletter, get our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter for details of future competitions.

Competition! Five copies of Twenty-First Century Design by Marcus Fairs to be won

Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the bottom of this page.

Competition! Five copies of Twenty-First Century Design by Marcus Fairs to be won

Subscribe to our newsletter, get our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter for details of future competitions.

Competition! Five copies of Twenty-First Century Design by Marcus Fairs to be won

Here’s some more information from publishers Carlton:


21st Century Design
New Design Icons from Mass Market to Avant-Garde

By Marcus Fairs
Foreword by Marcel Wanders

An up-to-date, striking survey of the cutting edge design landscape

21st Century Design is a fascinating survey of the contemporary design landscape, guiding the reader through the intoxicating array of contemporary movements, styles and trends, and identifying today’s leading designers, as well as future design classics. This pioneering publication places the contemporary scene in a historic framework and explores cultural and economic forces shaping design now and in the years to come. Accessible and engaging, it charts the incredible explosion of design worldwide and discusses cross-fertilization between design movements in what is rapidly emerging as one of the most exciting industries in the world. The book contains stunning full-colour photographs, featuring over 230 of the most popular and groundbreaking ‘future classics’ of design.

Marcus Fairs

Journalist, lecturer and entrepreneur Marcus Fairs, formerly founding editor of the architecture and design magazine, Icon, is editor of online design magazine, Dezeen (www.dezeen.com). Winner of several journalism awards, Marcus wrote and presented a documentary about Philippe Starck (BBC, 2003), has appeared in the TV series Home (BBC, 2006) and in September 2007 devised and curated the Trash Luxe exhibition of recycled design at Liberty’s (September 2007). He is also the author of Green Design (Carlton, March 2009). Marcus lives in London, England.

Marcel Wanders

Winner of numerous awards, such as Elle Decoration’s Designer of the Year in 2006, Marcel Wanders was selected as among the world’s 50 design icons in November 2007. Art director and co-owner of Moooi, he also works on architectural and interior design projects. His designs are exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the V&A in London.

Published by Carlton in paperback, April 2011, £20.00

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Signed copies of Green Design by Marcus Fairs

Looking for Christmas gifts? How about a personalised signed copy of Green Design by Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs? (more…)