Milan 08: young designers Mario Minale and Kuniko Maeda presented their latest project, Chroma Key, in the Salone Satellite at the Milan furniture fair.

The furniture collection includes a chair, cabinet, low table, long bench and table lamp, all covered with a blue and white moiré woven fabric.

The designers intend the forms to be at once recognisable and strange.

Here's some test from Minale-Maeda:

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Chroma Key

In a set of living items, cabinet, chair, low table, stool and table lamp, featureless and with minimal clues, limited to the proportions of the boxlike shapes and shyly protruding elements, the visual dimension as means of design is questioned.

The furniture is covered in fabric woven to break up and estrange known patterns, averaging into a neutral blue of mesmerizing appearance like props and visual clues in a studio, while the line pitch creates moirés when reproduced.

Generic and reclusive shapes giving away little of their content, readily manipulated and prone to noise, these objects so close to us in our everyday life reveal the qualities of contemporary product culture’s emphasis on the visual.

In its estranged relationship between appearance and content it creates a discomforting ambiguity turning the seemingly familiar into obscure blue boxes.

Cabinet
126x54xH105cm

Chair
51x45xH77cm

Long Stool
100x48xH44cm

Low Table
70x70xH35cm

Table Lamp
52x52xH58cm