Milan Design (Eco)System: A Data-Centric Inquiry to Investigate Temporary and Permanent Components of Design in Urban Context

This paper retraces the main stages of the Milan Design (Eco)System, a research project developed under the scientific supervision of the Department of Design at Politecnico di Milano, funded by Salone del Mobile.Milano between 2024 and 2025. The project aimed to build a contextualized, data-centric inquiry into the impact of Milan Design Week and Salone del Mobile.Milano, while simultaneously accounting for the broader economic and cultural design system of Milan (i.e., the Milan Design System). The investigation adopted a three-layered, time-sensitive methodological framework to guide data collection and analysis. The first two layers concern the “temporary” manifestation of the city as a “design capital”, becoming publicly evident during the days of the event (the last weeks of April every year). These are: i. the Milan Design Week events; and ii. the impact of visitors (i.e., business tourists and design lovers). Regarding the Milan Design Week events, we collected several types of information (e.g., subjects involved, content of exhibitions, components/materials of temporary installations, location, etc.) through a participatory field observation conducted during the days of Milan Design Week 2024 and 2025 by approximately 100 students from the School of Design at Politecnico di Milano each year. With regard to the impact of visitors, this was explored by integrating heterogeneous datasets shared by local data holders (i.e., organizations holding relevant data as a by-product of their activities). We collected and systematised them along an idealized “visitor journey”, which included several areas of impact (e.g., airport arrivals, use of trains and underground, shared vehicles, hotel and non-hotel accommodation, etc.). The third level of the framework concerns the “permanent” elements that characterise Milan and its urban area in terms of its design economic–cultural system. Following previous research, this “Milan Design System” was conceptualized and quantitatively measured through its main subsystems, including professional activities, fairs, showrooms, cultural events, and educational institutions. This work achieved several contributions: i. It represents an original attempt to simultaneously measure the short-term and long-term components of design manifestations within an urban ecosystem, and presents them in two Annual Reports produced for Salone del Mobile.Milano and widely disseminated; ii. it has gathered and systematised several dataset that provide a timely quantitative and objective picture of the phenomenon analysed; iii. It discusses the interplay between short-term manifestations of design in the urban context (Milan perceived as an international design capital) and its long-term elements (e.g., actual design workers, employers, the education system, etc.). In the concluding section, we elaborate on the research contribution to studies concerned with design systems, design economies and culture, fields that have become increasingly relevant both in Italy and in the international scene. Finally, we propose open research directions for the translation of this acquired knowledge into projects aimed at supporting cities with high design capital.