PANASONIC - An Intro to Milan Design Week

SMaRT Marketing Director, Jeff Wichmann, explores the Panasonic exhibit at Milan Design Week.

The vast array of installation displays at Milan's Design Week was mind-boggling. Thousands of world-class designers descended onto this gorgeously grungy fashion-conscious city to make it the Capital of International Design. Hundreds of old warehouses, courtyards, and ancient Italian pavilions and courtyards were filled with elaborately furnished innovative design concepts for furniture, architecture, auto, lighting, art, fashion, appliances and housewares to be used in either the home, corporate boardrooms, hotels, restaurants, or clubs. All together, it was a design lasagna: inspirational, abstract, efficient, low-brow, hi-brow and a little absurd.
Electronics giant Panasonic featured Japanese lighting designer Naoto Fukasawa on opening night to show off his latest concepts. Set in an upscale Milan district warehouse, he and his team converted the interior into a minimal black and white labyrinth of lighting installation. Though the white mannequin statues at the entrance desk were unexplainable, they brought abstract comedic relief to a corporate stage show of dangling orbs and desk lamps.

Marrying design and technology, Panasonic used... "concealed mechanisms and quality materials to make for better design." Their fixtures consisted of glowing spheres, domes, and buckets, all with a classical appearance, yet Fukasawa emphasized, "They may look old, but they are very modern." In other words, if it ain't broke... Yet, Panasonic claims their latest "light sources" are built with environment-concious, energy saving designs "for high efficiency and long life." Today, while every company is tattooing itself with green stamp mantras to demonstrate at least an essence of sustainability, Panasonic is no exception.

Also on display were relaxing lounge chairs that electronically swayed forward and back. Reclined in these futuristic Lazyboys, staring up at the myriad of lights on display, I got my first taste of holistic design that the Festival portrays: our lives, surrounded by good design, is essential to our well being.