Enhance 2025 Champions Material Innovation at Milan Design Week

Building on its successful debut, Enhance, the pioneering exhibition format launched by DesignWanted, returned to Milan Design Week in 2025 with a strong focus on material-driven innovation and global sustainability.

Enhance by DesignWanted debuted at Milan Design Week in 2024 with what was a pioneering exhibition format – it provided a platform that brought design research to life.

This year, as part of the Isola Design Festival, Enhance continued to explore design’s evolving impact, driven by a commitment to innovation, sustainability and community. The exhibition was housed in an early 20th-century complex originally used as a rubber factory in the Basic Village on Via dell’Aprica 12 – an apt setting that echoed the sentiment of repurposing for sustainability.

Patrick Abbattista, founder of DesignWanted explains that ENHANCE was a way to bring design research to life in a tangible way. “It’s less about having all the answers and more about offering a space to explore meaningful questions with our audience,” he says.

Enhance aligns with the seven Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) identified by World Design Organization members as particularly relevant to the industrial design community. The aim of the exhibition is to challenge the conventional boundaries of design and offer an experience that highlights design’s potential to reshape society. Juan Torres, ENHANCE’s director adds “With each edition, we’re experimenting and adapting. This year, we’re excited to dive into material innovation, inviting visitors and designers to consider how materials can shape sustainable design. It’s a journey for all of us, and we’re learning as we go.”

Enhance plans to extend its reach, with potential future exhibitions in collaboration with international design events.

We pick a few of the products that stood out for their material innovation. 

Desideria for Chroma Composites by Debonademeo Studio

Desideria, a totemic lamp representing a reaching towards the stars with feet firmly planted on the ground, is the offering of Padua and Milan based Debonademeo Studio headed by Luca De Bona and Dario De Meo.

The studio worked in collaboration with Chroma Composites, a company that aims to give a new life to what others might consider ‘waste’. An Italian composite manufacturer, Chroma fuses its matrix with materials such as metals, wood, marble and precious stones, creating unique materials. In Desideria, a local red marble from Vitulano meets a composite terrazzo composed of travertine, fragments of recycled glass and pigments in a non-toxic resin, to create a sculptural lamp. A lampshade made up of pigmented resin binding together fragments of recycled glass sits atop the column, guiding the eye upward, heavenward.

Trunk by WAH

WAH is an award winning Japanese multi-disciplinary design unit headed by Masataka Wakisaka and Takashi Hatta. Their “Trunk” is a series of modular floor and pendant lights that are part of the firm’s ‘Light of Anima’ collection that aims to introduce nature into urban spaces through the use of materials such as wood and stone.

The body of the lamps or ‘trunks’ are clad with recyclable cork and tiles, the natural texture of which evokes the feel of a tree truck; cutouts along the body either glow with a soft, diffuse light or reveal what lies beyond – the experience not unlike viewing a tree trunk from different angles.

The Self-Bent Chair by Joshua Klappe

Joshua Klappe (1986) is a Rotterdam-based industrial designer whose practice consists of thorough explorations of materials and their production processes.

Klappe’s Self-Bent Chair is an expressions of wood’s natural tendency to warp depending on its moisture content. Instead of perceiving this as a disadvantage, Klappe decided to use this tendency to create deliberately curved shapes. Working with furniture maker Rutger Graas, Klappe explored a new technique called ‘wood programming’ that involves humidifying, gluing and drying sections of timber. Using this, the designer was able to curve wood without using moulds and presses – relying instead on the natural propensity of the material to curve and warp to create the solid beech chair on display.

Polar Shelf & the Iceberg Series by Home by Zeo

The Iceberg Series by Australian design studio Home by Zeo was so named because of the unseen effort behind the pieces on display – 17 years of work that went into material research and sustainable design.

At the core of the Iceberg Collection is Zeoform Micro Pulp—a material crafted using just waste paper reinforced with industrial-strength hemp fibre and water. Nothing else. Completely sustainable, breaking down into soil and leaving no trace behind once its life is over.

The sculptural Iceberg Table combines tempered glass supported by white icebergs finished in Zeoforms signature coral texture, while the streamlined Polar Shelf combines lightweight aluminium shelves with a structure of this repurposed plant waste.

Buoy by Shellf Life

Rhode Island based Felicia Neuhof is an entrepreneur, architectural designer and innovator who turns discarded seashells into furniture, lighting, and architectural materials through her venture Shellf Life.

Her work transforms tons of shells from the seafood industry into sophisticated design pieces, simultaneously tackling waste reduction and creating economic opportunities for coastal communities.

At Enhance, she showcased Buoy, a curvilinear stool made of 3 distinct layers, each comprising a material sourced from different parts of the world. At the heart of Felicia’s practice is a simple but powerful idea: sometimes the best innovations are hiding in plain sight, like the shells left over from your last oyster happy hour.

Canopy by Bundle Studio

Bundle Studio was founded by Copenhagen based furniture and product designers Jón Hinrik Höskuldsson and Kirstine Nørgaard Sejersen. Kirstine’s expertise lies in material-driven design and experimental methods, while Jón, with his background in carpentry and furniture design, focuses on the structural integrity and aesthetic appeal of their designs. The duo worked together on their Master’s thesis in furniture design while at the Royal Danish Academy, exploring bio-based materials and their applications in design.

Canopy, a stackable, lightweight mono-material stool by thermo-pressing flax fibres and PLA into rigid shells, is the result of a deep dive on biomaterials and their structural and aesthetic potential. The stool weighs 1.5 kg, with about half of that weight being bio-based plastic, and allows for easy disassembly with eight bolts, ensuring a simple and functional construction.