Words by Andi Cross. Photography by Adam Moore.

Meeting Marie

I’d never seen colors like it. Red, orange, and yellow coming together over water. Resting over the horizon with a calm and still cerulean ocean below. The air smelled like coconut, probably because that’s all we’d been eating for a week, and probably because coconuts can be found everywhere in Vanuatu. I sat on the shore with Marie, her hand in mine. Hers were large, strong. Callused from years of experience. My other hand traced patterns in the sand, as if I might never touch this exact place again. And the truth was, I probably wouldn’t. That’s the struggle with being on a multi-year expedition around the world: you have to get good at saying goodbye to the people and places you fall in love with.

We sat in silence for a while before Marie asked me to read her the story I’d written about my partner, Adam Moore, and I diving her Little Bay. No one had ever gone far enough past the wave break to see what was out there, and she wanted to know what we’d found. After all, she spent her entire life protecting this stretch of ocean without ever catching a glimpse beneath its surface. I suspected she didn’t know how to swim, as that was common for Indigenous women of the South Pacific islands.

A sense of nerves washed over me. What if she didn’t like it? What if my descriptions didn’t land? These are the things that run through your mind when you step into different cultures, into alternate worlds. You’re always wondering when your welcome will run thin. I was hesitant to start, but I couldn’t deny the request. She had been so gracious hosting us for over a week, as if we were two of her own.

I cleared my throat, and with a shaking voice, began by describing the will power it took to get there in the first place. I had been the one to reach out to Marie wanting to learn more about the bay. I’d seen a single photo of it online in my research of the region, and in turn, found her—appearing as nothing more than an email address. I had no idea who she was or what she looked like. If she’d even respond at all to my random fascination with her home, in what some would call the middle of nowhere.

Marie had to travel 45 minutes from her village in the north of Espiritu Santo down to the provincial capital, Luganville, to even begin our correspondence. Our conversations came in fragments, half-understood words. There was a significant amount of waiting between messages. But after a few months, we had somehow made a plan. She agreed to open up one of her bungalows to me, and I agreed to show up.

Our instant connection was uncanny, despite coming from completely different worlds. Me, a New Yorker who had moved to the other side of the globe to become a scuba diver. Her, a ni-Vanuatu from a nation comprising 83 islands. I found immediate comfort in her warm smile. In her welcoming gift of a road-side coconut. She hugged me so tightly upon our first meeting, as if we were kindred spirits.

I went on to recount the small pranks she played on us throughout our stay. All our shared laughter. I told her how I felt more relaxed than I can remember sleeping in her handmade beachside bungalows—the sound of the ocean rocking me to sleep every night. How her cooking—from the coconut crab the size of my head to the fresh fish caught just down the road—would be forever embedded in our memories. I told her how both Adam and I valued every detail she so meticulously planned, all to ensure we felt like Vanuatu was a place we could call our own. Even if we all knew it never would be.

Looking back on that first plunge into Marie’s Little Bay, we were met with a reef untouched by time. Vibrant and alive, unlike anything we had seen. Colors that only nature can create, much like the Vanuatuan sunset, flooded our senses. It was hard not to get emotional. Adam and I had seen so much damage underwater—where even the most iconic reefs are struggling with bleaching, pollution, degradation. But this place was free from those scars. I was thankful to see something so wholesome and resilient could still be found in this hard world. Both on land and out to sea. The reef reminded me of Marie.

I paused and looked over at her. She was crying, trying to hide away the tears rolling down her rounded face. “No one has ever written a story like this for me. I never knew what was in my Little Bay. Now you’ve shown me. My work protecting it was worth something. I’ll never forget you for this.”

For Marie, this newfound knowledge meant she had the ability to open her bungalows to divers. An alternate livelihood she, and her entire community, so desperately needed. The pandemic had hit Vanuatu’s tourism businesses hard, like it did throughout most of the Pacific Islands. She walked me through her grand plans. I had helped make them actionable and sustainable. And on my end, I was starting to realize Adam and I were on to something bigger with this expedition concept we’d conjured up. I’d envisioned a future where my calling was here, on the edges, helping people see what might be out of sight, even in their own backyard.

Discovering Our Edge

I met Marie in 2023, not fully understanding the gravity of that moment. I didn’t yet know that Adam and I would go on to meet many more people like her on what we had started calling the Edges of Earth expedition—an idea that first surfaced years earlier, in 2019. I didn’t know how many times we’d have to say goodbye. How often we’d leave places we had come to love.

It all started when I moved from the east coast of the United States to the far-flung remoteness of Western Australia. Perth, the only major city in the state, felt rugged in a way I couldn’t fathom coming from a city of nearly nine million. People went barefoot to the supermarket. Kangaroos were just as much neighbors as humans. Status wasn’t tied to what you earned, but instead to the size of the waves you could surf. At least, that’s how I came to understand it through Adam.

The more we explored this wild west, the more a question began to follow me: what else is out there? In the vastness of a state the size of half the US, with only three million people spread across it, I tapped into an insatiable curiosity. One that came less from ambition, and more from a desire to understand what I did not.

At the time, Adam was working brutally long days as an accountant while I was in strategy, selling things that didn’t feel like they mattered, to people who didn’t really need them. We had built clear, defined skills over the course of our twenties. But the way we were using them didn’t sit right. Was this really it? Was this how we were meant to spend our lives? Slaves to a computer screen? Selling our souls to whatever mega company we were to work for next?

As our relationship grew, so did our time mulling over those questions. We’d brainstorm on long car rides looking for surf about the life we wanted. And about what we could actually contribute to the cause we both passionately cared about: Earth. As we contrasted our workdays with weekends spent on Western Australia’s white-sand beaches, we watched as two completely different versions of life were unfolding.

At the same time, I was diving nonstop—what had brought me here in the first place. I was spending nearly as much time underwater as I was on land, documenting places like the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Triangle whenever I could. And with every dive, I started to notice where there was beauty, there was also destruction. Plastic caught in coral and damage where there should have been life. Every dive reminded me of the tension my life now held. The endless consumer products of my origins and the wilderness of my new home.

I was living in two worlds that didn’t reconcile. New York was the place that shaped me—centered around consumption, ambition, and always-on speed. And then there was Perth—a place that stripped things back, reconnecting me to nature while pulling me further from everything familiar. I couldn’t fully belong to either. I felt stuck between them, trying to figure out how to make sense of both without turning my back on one.

My dive guides, often locals, would unknowingly cut through that internal battle. They spoke about their work with a kind of actualization I didn’t have. Their lives were centered around protecting their home. They were fixated on restoring reefs by hand, removing waste piece by piece, pushing for policies to safeguard what remained. Not for recognition and certainly not for reward. Just because it was theirs to protect. They were doing it out of love.

I was struck by these narratives. By how deeply they could commit to a place, while I still had a foot in two worlds. Of all the questions building in me about our planet in decline, my purpose, and where I fit into any of it, one rose above the rest. Why weren’t these stories from the edges being told?

By 2023, Adam and I couldn’t ignore these questions anymore. We both wanted to feel something different in our work, and we wanted to understand how other people were building lives that felt aligned with what mattered to them. So we sold most of what we owned, cancelled our lease, and packed our lives into two bags. One for dive gear, the other for everything else.

The plan was to move from one edge to the next. Spend time with people doing the hardest work in the field. Instead of leading or talking, we were to listen and learn. And our hope was, with the skills and connections we had, we could help carry their impact further. A few people took a chance on us in those early days. Marie was one of them.

A New Way of Life

The rest of 2023 was spent moving through the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, each step across the eastern hemisphere testing us in ways we hadn’t anticipated. We learned quickly how to adapt—to unfamiliar food, to constant movement, to discomfort that slowly became routine. Nights on the floor of a makeshift cabin with Kanak families in the north of New Caledonia toughened us. A cliffside shelter in the Solomon Islands, with torrential rain hammering down for a week straight, showed us how little we actually needed. Sleepless nights camping in Thailand, sea lice lighting our skin on fire, made us appreciate our health in a way we never had before.

And it didn’t ease up. In Cambodia, relentless storms left us unsure what we’d wake up to. In Vietnam, pollution was inescapable—on land and underwater. The Andaman Islands brought food poisoning that stopped us in our tracks. In the Philippines, we came face-to-face with illegal fishing fleets that shook us to our core. It was physically draining in a way that could have broken us. But what hit us harder was the weight of what we were seeing.

It’s one thing to read about a changing climate. It’s another to live inside it. To see, up close, how the most vulnerable communities are carrying the consequences of decisions made far beyond their control. They would often be living among trash that has washed in from other countries that were far more populated than their slice of island. They would experience intensifying storms that would destroy their homes and deplete them of their savings. Large in part due to a warming planet that they had very little to do with based on their carbon footprint.

We’d lie awake at night, silent, trying to process it all. The damage and scale of it. The responsibility we started to realize was in our hands to ensure we weren’t extracting and giving as much as we could instead. By morning, we were exhausted—not just from the harsh conditions, but from our endless cognitive processing of what we had seen.

And still, we never questioned being there. Because every day, we were alongside people who refused to give up. We were diving, trekking, documenting alongside scientists, First Nations communities, conservationists, and activists. And over and over, there it was: that same connection I had felt with Marie. It didn’t matter where we came from or how different our lives looked. We were always welcomed with open arms when able to communicate our shared commitment to protect what was still here.

What was most potent, however, was the outlook of those we met. These were people living on the frontlines of the climate crisis, watching their ecosystems change in real time. Despite the drama of this loss, their stories weren’t well known; they weren’t social media stars and the contents of their days weren’t clickbait. And yet, their sense of purpose was unwavering. Instead of being stuck in place, paralyzed by what was happening to them, they were acting on it. It forced us to look at ourselves differently. When we showed up exhausted or overwhelmed, carrying the weight of the problem, while they carried only solutions, we had to check ourselves.

Take the Tetepare Descendants Association of the Solomon Islands. They pushed to keep their ancestral homeland free from the logging industry—one of the only successful holdouts of 1,000 islands in the country to do so. Or Andaman Discoveries of Thailand, helping the once nomadic Moken people reclaim their seafaring ways after the government revoked them in 2004. Or Marine Conservation Cambodia, which was warding off illegal trawlers that were killing off the country’s marine life.

These people became our colleagues and our friends. Our guiding teachers and our definition of heroes. Because of this, our expedition work was far from some pursuit of discovery, or a claim to something new—which is how we once understood expeditioning to be. This instead was a journey to stand alongside those already doing the hardest work, and to help it reach beyond the edges they were fighting to protect.

Finding the Positive Outliers

By 2024, we found ourselves driving the length of Central America in a car that was barely street legal, crossing rough borders from Panama to Belize. Along the eastern coast of Mexico, we dove the world’s deepest blue hole, spending time learning from the fishermen who had first discovered it on how they were now planning on protecting it. Further north, we dove through the cenotes—sacred sinkholes and caves that the Mayans called their underworld. We crossed the country to see how marine protected areas were being created and enforced by local communities, those deeply connected to this land so rich with biodiversity.

In South America, we moved through Patagonia and out to the Falkland Islands / Malvinas, where king penguins wandered close without hesitation. Off Argentina, elephant seals stretched across the shoreline, unfazed by our presence. It often felt like we had arrived at exactly the right moment for the perfect wild encounter. But for us it was never about that. We were always searching for the human connection.

By the time we reached the southernmost tip of the Americas, two years in, we had documented close to 200 of these progressive case studies. We called them this because, to us, they were blueprints for a better future—repeatable models that others could use, if experiencing similar challenges, in similar environments. Through this, we had met over 1,000 positive outliers, as we started to call them. People and teams facing their ecological and cultural challenges head on, and making a real difference despite the odds.

When we immersed ourselves in places far removed from what we once called “normal,” the more living at the edges began to change us. It was showing up in what we chose to eat, forcing us to reduce our meat and fish intake. It crept up in the conversations we were having, finding ourselves in heated conversations about the challenges of open-net salmon farming instead of what’s trending on Netflix. It even started showing up in how we looked, as we rotated through four outfits and washed our clothes in buckets. We didn’t care. We loved it.

In return, we leaned into our role on behalf of those on the edges. We were never in these places to lead conservation work, but rather, to help move it forward. To connect these teams with the exposure and support they needed—whether through funding, media, or simply getting the right people to pay attention. We had the ability to do that because of our previous corporate careers, which was largely why I didn’t want to turn my back on home. Home gave me something valuable—a tangible skill and the work ethic to back it up. It just had to be harnessed and curated in the right way. Towards something that provided value to people who needed it most. And because of that, the relationships we built didn’t end when we moved on. If anything, they deepened.

I remember a stretch of road through Patagonia on the Chilean side, asking Adam if we’d ever be able to live like we once did back in New York, or even Perth. Perth felt large now. Would we care about what we wore, what we owned, how big our house was? Could we go back to small talk about the weather? Would we always be thinking about the intensifying storms we’d seen on expedition instead? Could we eat the same processed foods, knowing the true cost with every bite?

By the time we had crossed five countries in South America and were on our way to Africa, we had our answer. There was no “going back.” Even our physicality had changed—hardly recognizable to fair-weather-friends who knew us in another life. Our face and limbs were always lightly dusted with dirt. Hair knotted and sunbleached, from too much exposure to the elements. Our hands had hardened. They reminded me of Marie.

Our Future on the Edges

Today, we are three years into this global voyage. Six continents, 47 countries, 250 communities, and counting. We’re still meeting people on all kinds of edges, from the most remote to the most urban. Positive outliers exist everywhere, if you’re willing to look closely enough.

We measure success differently now. In the relationships built and in the tears we shed upon a goodbye. When we get to share with a woman, for the first time, what sits beneath the surface of her Little Bay that she spent her life protecting. That’s success. Marie was the one who showed us what life on the edges could be. She reframed why we explore. While it was never about the perfect shot, or the dopamine hit of Instagram likes, we didn’t have a full handle on the “why.” She showed us that, to explore, means to forge deeper human connection. Exploration means helping people see what has always been there, even if just slightly out of reach.

What we didn’t expect was how hard it would be to carry that way of living back with us. To sit in a city and not think about the coastlines we’ve seen changing. To have conversations that skim the surface after years spent in places where everything discussed is painfully deep about our planet’s future. To exist within systems of overconsumption and resource extraction that we once moved through so easily, now seeing them for what they are. We’re still learning how to live with that tension. How to exist in both worlds without turning away from either. How to let them benefit one another, instead of letting the never-ending contradictions pull us to shreds.

Escaping one life for another was never the grand plan. It was to understand how to bring them together. To take what we’ve learned on the edges—the way people commit themselves to something bigger than they are—and apply it to the lives we came from. To think more boldly and to question what we know. To act with intention, which we certainly didn’t fully grasp before this journey. Back then, we were more fixated on ourselves—what we needed and wanted—oblivious to the fact that even our smallest actions cause ripple effects reaching the ends of the Earth.

We’re not finished. There are still more positive outliers to meet and more case studies to carry forward. But our burning questions have changed. Gone are the days of chasing “what’s out there?” or “where do I fit in?” Those questions feel selfish now. Instead, we’re asking how far stories of human ingenuity can reach. Can they outshine the clickbait? Can they shift culture? Can they open our eyes to what we stand to lose if we don’t change our ways? We will keep showing up to play our part in it all. At home and on every edge that welcomes us next.

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About the Cover Conservationists

Andi Cross and Adam Moore are the co-founders of Edges of Earth, a multi-year global expedition documenting the people, places, and practices shaping the future of ocean and land conservation. Three years in, they have traveled across six continents, 47 countries, and 250 communities, working alongside the scientists, First Nations leaders, conservationists, and local stewards they call positive outliers. Andi writes and leads the storytelling side of the expedition; Adam handles photography and field direction. Follow their journey at edgesofearth.com.

In Halls 13 and 15 of Fiera Milano Rho this week, visitors have been wandering through what looks like a dream of a hotel that doesn’t exist. Aurea, an Architectural Fiction, designed by the Paris studio Maison Numéro 20, stages a sequence of imagined rooms — winter gardens, smoking lounges, lobbies threaded with Art Deco and surrealist references — built, in part, from recycled ocean plastics. It is luxurious, theatrical and self-consciously decadent. It is also, by the designer’s own framing, an argument: that a circular supply chain doesn’t have to look like a compromise.

Whether anyone outside the press preview believes that argument is the question hanging over the entire 64th edition of Salone del Mobile.Milano.

 

A short history of the world’s largest furniture fair

Salone was launched in September 1961 by a group of Italian furniture makers looking for a way to push exports during the country’s post-war boom, and it has scaled into the global benchmark for the sector — a 169,000-square-meter, six-day annual referendum on what the design industry thinks is next. The 2026 edition, running April 21 through 26, has drawn more than 1,900 exhibitors from 32 countries; the 2025 edition pulled 302,548 visitors from 151 countries, with roughly two-thirds arriving from outside Italy. Designers, architects, retail buyers, hoteliers and developers come to read the room. What gets specified at Salone tends to end up in living rooms, lobbies and offices for the decade that follows.

That makes the fair’s chosen theme matter. This year it is A Matter of Salone — a deliberate pivot from the 2025 human-centered campaign toward something more elemental. President Maria Porro, a fourth-generation furniture maker, framed the brief in an interview before the fair: the possibility of beginning from a stone, a piece of wood, a recycled plastic and giving it shape and function and beauty as something that already exists. Provenance, in other words, is being pushed to the front of the design process rather than treated as a disclosure on a spec sheet.

 

What the fair is claiming this year

The infrastructure backing the rhetoric is real, if incremental. Salone holds ISO 20121 certification for sustainable event management, and the 2026 program continues a 2023 Manifesto for Circular Design that pushed exhibitors toward modular, reusable booths. The newly debuted Salone Raritas pavilion for collectible design — curated by Annalisa Rosso with exhibition architecture by Formafantasma — was conceived as a circular structure, every element designed to be dismantled and reused in future editions. Formafantasma is also curating the public talk series Drafting Futures, now in its fourth year, focused on supply chains, regulation and the ecological transition.

Down the hall, SaloneSatellite — the under-35 platform celebrating its 27th edition with 700 young designers — has built its 2026 theme around “Skilled Craftsmanship + Innovation.” The framing is pointed: craft as a technical prerequisite for designing things that can actually be repaired and disassembled, not nostalgia. Across the broader exhibitions, FSC-certified wood is being treated less as a marketing badge and more as a baseline expectation, and a growing cohort of brands are showing pieces incorporating bio-waste, ocean-bound plastics and other recovered streams.

 

The ocean angle, surfacing slowly

Salone has not built a dedicated marine pavilion or a flagship ocean campaign — but the thread is there if you pull on it. Aurea is the most visible example, weaving recycled ocean plastics into hospitality interiors that are explicitly pitched at the luxury market. Salone’s own editorial desk has separately spotlighted what it calls design that comes from the sea: companies like Scale, based in the French Basque Country, developing biodegradable, recyclable materials drawn from renewable marine resources, and a growing class of producers treating coastal waste streams as feedstock rather than refuse.

The framing in those Salone-published features is striking. The marine ecosystem, the editors argue, has historically been treated as predatory and disposable — a place humans take from rather than circulate with. Furniture, of all things, is being floated as one of the industries that could reverse that posture, by absorbing what’s already in the water into the objects that fill the rooms we live in. It is, at minimum, a useful provocation. Whether it scales beyond a handful of installations and capsule lines is a different question.

 

The paradox no one at the fair quite addresses

Here is where the story gets harder.

For all the circularity rhetoric on the show floor, the commercial energy of Salone 2026 is concentrated in two places that don’t entirely line up with it. The first is Salone Contract, a new long-term initiative led by OMA — Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten — built around a global hospitality and real estate market Porro has put at €68 billion today, projected past €110 billion within a decade. The second is Salone Raritas itself: a curated marketplace of limited-edition, collectible, often vintage and antique pieces whose entire value proposition is rarity. Both are explicitly pitched as the future of the fair. Both depend on appetites — exotic materials, one-of-a-kind sourcing, hotel-scale specification — that are difficult to square with a fully circular supply chain.

Talk to working designers and the disconnect sharpens. Specifiers report that when two pieces are functionally similar and one is more sustainable, the cheaper option still wins by default — and that for projects with budget, clients are not asking for reclaimed teak or ocean plastic. They are asking for the rare stone, the unusual veneer, the material that registers as expensive precisely because it is hard to get and far from where it will live.

Alessia Cirillo, who works at Christian Dior, sees the same pattern from inside the luxury industry. “Luxury still pushes for the extraordinary,” she said. “The exotics, something that is not reachable.” Sustainability, in her reading, is talked about more now than ever, but the conversation has outpaced the practice. “We’re preaching to the choir, but I don’t think we’re walking the talk.”

Walk the streets around Brera and Tortona during Fuorisalone and the same pattern repeats among the public. People want what looks rich.

Ohara Rodriguez, who lives in Milan and works in tourism, came to Salone shopping for a project in Brazil. She is the kind of buyer the fair’s sustainability messaging is implicitly aimed at: actively looking for quality, actively interested in sustainable options. “I’m seeing that we have some difficulty in the choices of sustainable products,” she said, “because sometimes they cost so much, much more than the non-sustainable ones. And that makes a conscious choice harder, in a moment when we are living in this world of climate change, when we need a more sustainable conscience in every sense.”

She locates the responsibility upstream. “We need laws,” she said — laws that would force the substitution of plastics with recycled materials, coconut fiber, bamboo, cardboard. “But politicians have no interest in banning certain materials that could improve the planet.” Her closing image returns to where the article began: “With small actions, we can improve many situations in the ocean, and in the world in general.”

The economics reinforce it. “In a moment where people are very conscious about spending money,” Cirillo said, “if there are still options that are not that expensive, the average consumer will go to something cheaper rather than something that is sustainable but costs more. So it’s more a niche than the average person.”

This is the contradiction the fair’s communications strategy doesn’t fully resolve. Sustainability is presented as a baseline; rarity, exoticism and bespoke luxury are presented as the aspiration. Aurea tries to collapse the two — luxury as conscious intent rather than ostentation, in the studio’s language — but it remains an installation, not a sales floor.

It is worth noting, though, that the paradox is sharpest at the decorative end of design, where status is signaled through rarity. In functional categories the dynamic looks different. Matteo Zerlia, a design consumer in Milan who also works in the home appliance industry, points out that new EU energy-declaration rules and rising electricity costs have already moved sustainability into the center of routine consumer comparison. “People are looking for it,” he said, “and producers are required to work on it.” His sector is leaning on transitional engineering — different steel grades, reduced material counts, lower energy draws — to clear new regulatory thresholds. The pattern is sectoral: where utility and operating cost are visible to the buyer, sustainability has stopped being optional. Where status is the product, it has not.

 

Where this leaves the industry

Not every voice in the industry reads this as a stalemate. Martin Iona, an architect and designer at STI Milano, frames the work in slower, more procedural terms — material choices, production processes and life-cycle thinking integrated into the design process gradually, without disrupting the formal language that defines a studio’s identity. “Sustainability emerges not as a declared goal, but as a conscious direction, requiring rigor, research, and critical capacity,” he writes. (His full statement appears at the end of this article.)

Cirillo, returning to the question after a few days’ thought, framed the same point in operational terms. “The industry is really trying. They understood that they needed to change, but the road is yet to be paved,” she said. The hard part, in her view, is not intent but the scale of structural change real circularity demands — how products are sourced, produced, and crucially, what happens to them after a season or a collection. “Not destroying the pieces after two collections,” she said, “but creating a circularity that at the moment is very little.”

That framing matters, because it cuts against both the trade-show rhetoric and the cynical street-level read. There are a few honest answers to where this goes from here, and Salone 2026 hints at all of them without committing to one.

One is regulation, on the model already visible in appliances. As EU supply-chain and disclosure rules tighten across furniture, textiles and lighting, provenance documentation stops being optional, and the question of whether a buyer prefers sustainability becomes less relevant than whether a seller can legally avoid disclosing it. A second is redefinition: making circularity itself the status signal, the way reclaimed teak and visible repair have started to function in some segments — heirloom over disposable, traceable over exotic. A third, less comfortable answer is that the high end of the market simply continues to do what it has always done, while volume brands quietly decarbonize the middle and the bottom.

The fair’s bet, this year, seems to be on the second path. A Matter of Salone is at heart a campaign to make matter — its origin, its history, its reuse — feel desirable rather than dutiful. Whether the people writing the checks agree is something the show floor alone cannot answer.

The architect Lorenzo Claudiani framed the underlying stakes more starkly than any installation could:

Solo l’uomo tra tutte le specie può capire la differenza tra simbiosi e parassitismo ma è nella inabilità di scegliere la prima che si nasconde la sua fine.

Only humankind, among all species, can understand the difference between symbiosis and parasitism — but it is in the inability to choose the first that its end is hidden.

Salone, in that sense, is a small theater for a much older question.

 

 

 

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The 64th Salone del Mobile.Milano took place April 21–26, 2026 at Fiera Milano Rho. The 65th edition is scheduled for April 13–18, 2027.

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Article by Giacomo Abrusci, SEVENSEAS Media

 

 

 

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Full statement: Martin Iona, architect and designer, STI Milano

Translated from the Italian. Original text follows.

Sustainability and the culture of design: a conscious path 

In the contemporary design landscape, sustainability represents an increasingly necessary direction, but one still under construction. As an architect and designer at STI Milano, I believe it is essential to address this issue with a concrete and progressive approach, avoiding simplifications and declarative positions.

Our work is evolving toward a greater design awareness, which translates into growing attention to the choice of materials, production processes, and the life cycle of our products. This is not a radical and immediate change, but a path we are building with coherence — introducing more sustainable solutions without compromising the quality, identity, and durability that define our design.

In this sense, sustainability becomes a design criterion that integrates gradually into the process, guiding choices without distorting the formal language. Durability remains a central value: to design furniture is to create elements capable of moving through time, reducing the need for replacement and contributing to a more responsible approach.

In the context of Milan Design Week, this path takes on an even more relevant meaning, inserting itself into a broader dialogue between design, industry, and contemporary culture. Sustainability emerges not as a declared goal, but as a conscious direction, requiring rigor, research, and critical capacity.

It is in this perspective that I interpret the role of the architect today: not only as a designer of forms, but as a responsible figure, capable of guiding a real evolution of the design project toward more attentive, measured, and lasting models.

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Originale italiano

Sostenibilità e cultura del progetto: un percorso consapevole

Nel panorama contemporaneo del design, la sostenibilità rappresenta una direzione sempre più necessaria, ma ancora in fase di costruzione. In qualità di architetto e designer all’interno di STI Milano, ritengo fondamentale affrontare questo tema con un approccio concreto e progressivo, evitando semplificazioni e posizioni dichiarative.

Il nostro lavoro sta evolvendo verso una maggiore consapevolezza progettuale, che si traduce in una crescente attenzione alla scelta dei materiali, ai processi produttivi e al ciclo di vita dei prodotti. Non si tratta di un cambiamento radicale e immediato, ma di un percorso che stiamo costruendo con coerenza, introducendo soluzioni più sostenibili senza compromettere la qualità, l’identità e la durabilità che definiscono il nostro design.

In questo senso, la sostenibilità diventa un criterio progettuale che si integra gradualmente nel processo, orientando le scelte senza snaturare il linguaggio formale. La durabilità rimane un valore centrale: progettare arredi significa realizzare elementi capaci di attraversare il tempo, riducendo la necessità di sostituzione e contribuendo a un approccio più responsabile.

Nel contesto della Milano Design Week, questo percorso assume un significato ancora più rilevante, inserendosi in un dialogo più ampio tra progetto, industria e cultura contemporanea. La sostenibilità emerge così non come un traguardo dichiarato, ma come una direzione consapevole, che richiede rigore, ricerca e capacità critica.

È in questa prospettiva che interpreto oggi il ruolo dell’architetto: non solo come progettista di forme, ma come figura responsabile, capace di guidare un’evoluzione reale del progetto verso modelli più attenti, misurati e duraturi.

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