SALONE NEWS 2007 in Milan vol.7
Young designers at Satellite

I walk all around Satellite. I do this not only for writing this ‘ Salone Report ’ but also for finding the designers I should invite to participate in ‘Designers’ Catalogue‘, an annual event held in July at Design Gallery of Ginza Matsuya Department Store. The most important purpose of this event is to find young designers we are to back up. The designers sought for may not be matured yet but should be promising ones in the future. Almost all designers I’ve selected for this event in the past are now as visibly active as I expected.

The goal of Satellite of Milan Salone has been the same as that of Designers’ Catalogue, that is, to discover and give the chances to promising young talents. Accordingly young designers full of energy and hope gather here at Satellite to present their works. Their goals are varied, though. Some present their works with playful wits. Others exhibit their works regarding the occasion as just one of many exhibitions. The young designers I want to find here are neither type of them. The kind of people I look for are the young having desperately been looking for the chance to commercialize their works. They should have clear ideas but lack of the chances to introduce them as actual products. The undaunted spirit of such young designers always makes me feel refreshed.

One of the sad things in the field of ‘design’ is found in the fact that there’s always the possibility for excellent ideas not to be embodied because of various reasons. The original nature of ‘making things’ must have been literally ‘making things’, that is, craftsmen make things with their own hands interacting with what they are working on.
Since the post modern age, such a spirit of craftsmen has been lost because of the system of labor-division, which gave birth to a new category of workers called ‘designers’ as the people who only work on drawing and planning of ideas. Sadness of being designers is in such a fact. The blessed ones among those who have realized about it are to try to commercialize the products, the fruits of their ideas. It’s not something, however, that everyone can do because of many factors as financial reasons, technological reasons, strategic reasons for their sales and so on.

This place ‘Satellite’ has been the heating-pot of passions of such enthusiastic youth. Two years have passed since its renewal and this exhibition space has come to be a little too neat, which seems to make the young a kind of less passionate for getting out of hunger as they were. I feel a little disappointed about this.

Even so, thinking about the spirits of those who present their works, having paid the space-rental fee that cannot be a laughing matter, I cannot but come to visit Satellite every year.