Italians do it sitting down

Design these days may be a serious business involving seriously big bucks, but it is still capable of being great fun. At the Milan Furniture Fair, manufacturers both large and small, and designers of every rank, from enthusiastic wannabes to the unchallenged superstars, gather to spy and gossip. Each one is looking for the latest ideas and the upcoming trends.

As a result, the fair is the launch pad for countless new products. Every company worth its salt feels obliged to show off its wares hot from the mould, or sometimes the drawing board. Many of the designs will never make it into production, they may be too extreme or just too difficult to make, but they will influence the market over the coming year.

In Italy, design tends to be technology driven, with the big manufacturers, such as Cappellini, Kartell and Magis, spending a fortune on research and development. As Marco Gila, director at Cappellini, says: 'Design on its own is notenough, nor is technology. The two are inseparable. But above all we respect designers."

The result is lively Italian home sales and a big export market. Kartell is equally successful and its export manager explains: "We never see technical limits. Even when designers propose an idea that is not easy for us, we have to do it."

The proof of the pudding is in the extensive array of prototypes and work in progress on display in Milan By contrast, adventurous ideas in British furniture tend to come from one-off makers. Much of their work is in bent ply, for example, not just because it is a good material but because it's easy and cheap for a designer to make themselves.

Italian companies are able to play around with more advanced materials, especially plastics. Plastics are very much the in material in Milan with new chairs in extruded ABS by Tom Dixon and singlemoulded armchairs by Ron Arad.

Designers such as Arad play with their materials, but the experimentation is serious, even if the result is all fun.

A typical example is his Top Pot for Serralunga, a series of enormous pots that can be pushed and pulled into new shapes and sizes.

One of the best new plastic developments is Driade's Tokyo Pop, a family of organically flowing seats (an armchair, sofa, chaise longue and table stool) by new designer Tokujin Yoshioka. Attractive, practical and comfortable, it comes in straight polypropylene or upholstered in luxurious wool.

The Italian companies employ talent from around the world and the newest hot properties are the Campana brothers from Brazil, who have created several new designs for Edra. Their exotic Boa is a writhing mass of 90m of velvet-covered tubes, knotted together to create a low sofa. The idea is that the sitter can plunge his or her limbs between the tubes to cuddle up to the velvet. Though not as sensuous, Sushi, a ball seat, sporting a freak hairdo of strips of wool, astro turf, carpet and rubber, which the Campanas claim alludes to the mats and bedspreads made in the shanty-town favelas of Brazil, is equally striking.