Istituto Marangoni Milano • The School of Design has launched two new challenges for young international designers. Supported by Cappellini, Istituto Marangoni Milano Design announces the new branded scholarships “Sense It” and “Design for the Metaverse”.

“Sense It”, the contest for students in their last year of high school or with a high school diploma applying for the Three-year Course in Product Design starting in October 2022, focuses on a reflection on the growing importance of virtual interactions in the digital age, in which human senses such as touch and smell are acquiring new meanings. Design plays a crucial role in giving these senses a new value.

To win a scholarship participants will have to conduct visual research on the relationships between products (objects or furnishings) and the human senses, selecting the product that best reflects this connection. They will then have to express their choice through a series of images or a short video representing the sensory relationship between human beings and the product.the latter is for students wishing to specialise after graduation, an invitation to redesign iconic design pieces, setting them in a new digital Metaverse dimension. Both projects aim to encourage participants to bring feelings back to the centre and investigate new ways of designing products that can be used in virtual reality and marketed through digital media.

“Design for the Metaverse”, instead, focuses on the Metaverse, a three-dimensional evolution of the Internet where users can meet and virtually live. What will the design objects that furnish these virtual environments look like?

Candidates are invited to redesign an iconic Cappellini piece for a virtual scenario. Free from the material and structural constraints of the physical product, the redesigned piece can feature more extreme, courageous, even aesthetically reckless experimentation, trying to combine the visual possibilities of virtual reality with the quality and attention to detail of Italian design.

The authors of the best projects will be awarded a 100% scholarship on tuition fee to access the Product & Furniture Design Master’s Programme and a scholarship consisting of a € 5.000 deduction on tuition fee for the first year of the course up to € 15,000 over the 3 years of the course for the Three Year Programme in Product Design. They will have the opportunity to live a unique experience and study at Istituto Marangoni Milano: the beating heart of international design.

The deadline for submitting creative proposals for both contests is July 18.

Read the full regulation.

Submit your application