Zhang Zhoujie Digital Lab’s Endless Form, presented by Gallery ALL
This pioneering project incorporates artificial intelligence into the design process. For more than eight years the Zhang Zhoujie Digital Lab has been exploring how AI can map the real world and how to create individualized furniture based on its interactions with humans. This led to the development of the hardware sensor chair, which collects data when people sit on it. Zhang then developed software to use those data points to generate chairs in various forms that uniquely fit an individual’s body. Each chair is thus the result of collaboration between people and computers. According to Zhang, “Human emotions, instincts, and needs are complementary to artificial intelligence.” At first glance, these chairs look like they came from another world, with their futuristic perspectives and surprising angles. Though each is unique, as if a freely grown object, all are constructed of the same material and structural logic to create a unified whole. Fifty individual chairs and the hardware sensor chair, which visitors can interact with, are included in the exhibition. Zhang graduated from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design in London and is a member of the Architectural Association School of Architecture. Since establishing Zhang Zhoujie Digital Lab in 2010, he has been a pioneer in the realm of digital creativity. His work is known for being independent, experimental, and futuristic. Zhang believes that objects in the digital world can grow and morph much like things found in nature, and he is dedicated to discovering and exploring the methods within these transformations. His work focuses on logic, variety, and unpredictability, which is based on his understanding of nature. “It’s not about designing something,” he says. “It’s about finding something.”

DiscoGufram Presented by Gufram
Gufram’s restless energy and joie de vivre could not find a better way to explode during Design Miami/ Basel. Based on the historical pieces the company has presented in its colorful catalogues since the tumultuous and fascinating times of the Italian Radical Design movement, Gufram asks visitors to dance at DiscoGufram, its very own visionary disco. Discover how a symbolic place like the discotheque, a space intertwined with pop culture since the mid-1960s, can be rethought and reshaped by contemporary objects to combine past and present. Gufram invited three groups of creative minds—Italian Atelier Biagetti (Alberto Biagetti and Laura Baldassari), Dutch ROTGANZEN (Robin Stam and Joeri Horstink,) and French GGSV (Gaëlle Gabillet and Stéphane Villard)—to create a surreal disco. In this project Gufram pushes the limits of furniture to offer an energetic, kaleidoscopic, and enthusiastic experience. At DiscoGufram, every floor can be a dance floor.

Lina Bo Bardi Giancarlo Palanti Studio d’Arte Palma 1948 – 1951 Presented by Nilufar Gallery
Focusing on the work realized at the Estúdio de Arte e Arquitetura Palma, Nilufar Gallery presents the largest collection of Lina Bo Bardi’s furniture ever brought together. Many of the pieces displayed are rare objects originating in Brazil. The unique combination of the iconic and the everyday in her furniture is a powerful expression of the designer’s all- encompassing philosophy of design. As an architect, designer, scenographer, editor, writer, and illustrator, Bo Bardi was a woman of almost unlimited talent whose design vision was generous and uncompromising across a variety of disciplines. Studying architecture in Italy during World War II, Bo Bardi joined the resistance, an experience that profoundly shaped her understanding of architecture as a political and social endeavor. Later on, in Brazil, this sensibility matured and became the inspiration for sharp texts, open environments, and extraordinary buildings. Integrating architecture with furniture design, interiors, and often curating the programming of her public buildings, Bo Bardi created a bond between people and the spaces they inhabit. She pursued this ambition by mastering craft and fabrication processes in order to highlight the natural and local qualities of the materials and cultures around her. Collaborations with people from diverse fields were crucial to construct an extensive and shared body of knowledge. This is the case of Italian architect Giancarlo Palanti, with whom she founded the Estúdio de Arte e Arquitetura Palma, which designed and produced several furniture pieces.

Atelier Luma Presented By The Luma Foundation
Atelier Luma presents four pavilions displaying a selection of Atelier Luma’s projects developed from natural resources— algae, sunflowers, mussel waste, and rice husks—to create sustainable, innovative materials such as biopolymer and biolamin ate. The modular pavilions are covered with biomaterials, illustrating the potential uses of natural resources and waste––part of Aterlier Luma’s social design initiative that promotes new means of production that rely on local knowledge, craftsmanship, and technology. The Luma Foundation launched Atelier Luma in 2016 as part of an experimental cultural center under construction in Arlies in the South of France. The think tank, production workshop, and learning network is creating a cross-disciplinary center that builds on the local resources and ecological context and a social network of individuals and talent in Arles and beyond.