Fashion brand COS, skincare brand Aesop and management consultants McKinsey & Company are among the high-profile global companies that Dezeen is partnering with for Milan design week.
Dezeen will be hosting talks with each of these companies, as well as Italian furniture brand Poltrona Frau.
We will also be teaming up with a host of other furniture brands throughout the week, including Humanscale, USM, Minotti and B&B Italia, to produce videos about their latest projects.
Other brands we are working with include bathroom products brand Dornbracht and sanitary-ware manufacturer INAX, as well as software giant Autodesk and Dezeen Awards headline sponsor Delta Light, which is opening a new showroom in the city during design week, where you can pick up a postcard with a special discount code to enter Dezeen Awards 2019.
In addition, we are media partners with Rossana Orlandi's Ro Plastic Prize, part of the curator and gallery-owner's Guiltless Plastic initiative. The prize will be announced on Thursday 10 April at 5:00pm, with Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs on the judging panel.
Here is an overview of the events Dezeen is hosting or taking part in during the week:
Aesop – Poetry, Planet and Repair: Designing Green Spaces for the 21st century
Tuesday 9 April
Dutch landscape and interior designer studio Inside Outside has worked with Aesop on an installation in its Brera store. Marcus Fairs will join Inside Outside founder Petra Blaisse and six other speakers, including Carlo Ratti and Yibo Xu of Stefano Boeri Architetti, for a panel discussion.
The invite-only talk will look at the greening of cities, community and sustainability, touching on themes such as how design can improve our urban lives. A guided tour of the Biblioteca degli Alberi (Library of Trees) park, also designed by Inside Outside, will follow the discussion.
Damn magazine – Brexit versus Culture
Tuesday 9 April
Marcus Fairs will join a panel moderated by design journalist and editor Gabrielle Kennedy to discuss the effect that the UK's impending departure from the EU will have on the design industry and on culture more generally. The invitation-only conversation will take place at the Alcova venue on Via Populi Uniti, which is hosting a series of talks and performances through the week.
Other speakers on the 10-strong panel are design journalist and curator Max Fraser, Alex Coles, Aude Debard, Manick Govinda, Colum Leith, Sandra Phlippen, Zuki Sedgley, Matthew Ward and director of Waugh Thistleton Architects, Andrew Waugh.
McKinsey & Company – The Business Value of Design panel discussion
Wednesday 10 April
Partner at McKinsey Design Ben Sheppard will host a panel of four moderated by Marcus Fairs with experts including Google's vide president for hardware design Ivy Ross discussing the relationship between design and quantifiable business outcomes.
The talk draws on McKinsey Design's report, The Business Value of Design, published last year and will be held at the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Fondazione Feltrinelli, in front of an invitation-only audience of global leaders in design and business.
Humanscale – Bodies in Motion party
Wednesday 10 April
Dezeen is co-hosting an invite-only party with ergonomic office-furniture brand Humanscale to celebrate its installation Bodies in Motion, a moving sculpture made from 15 beams of light that responds to and mimics the viewer's movements.
The event will take place in the historic vaulted warehouses beneath Milan Central Station, where the installation designed by Todd Bracher and digital design studio The Green Eyl is located.
COS – in conversation with Arthur Mamou-Mani
Thursday 11 April
Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs will be in conversation with Arthur Mamou-Mani, the London-based French architect behind this year's COS installation. The eighth consecutive installation by the fashion brand at Milan design week, Mamou-Mani has put together a structure of 700 interlocking bio-bricks.
Taking place at Palazzo Isimbardi, the site of the installation, the pair will discuss its design, the process behind it and the importance of sustainability to its execution. Although invitation only, the event will be livestreamed on our Facebook page.
Poltrona Frau – Rethinking the Experience of Privacy
Friday 12 April
Towards the end of design week, associate partner at Foster + Partners Pietro Gottardi will join Marcus Fairs in conversation about rethinking the experience of privacy, and how the need to maintain it is changing the design process.
The event will take place in Poltrona Frau's showroom on Via Manzoni, which will feature an installation by architect Michele De Lucchi for the duration of design week. De Lucchi has divided the space into areas for work, leisure and communication.