Designers at Milan Design Week 2026 explore subconscious creativity

At Milan Design Week 2026, designboom hosted a panel titled 'Design Intuition: When Creativity Emerges from the Subconscious' within the ROOM FOR DREAMS activation on 21 April 2026. Panelists included Giovanni Moro, co-founder of UNIMATIC; Benoît Mintiens, founder of Ressence; and Mårten Claesson, co-founder of Claesson Koivisto Rune, moderated by designboom's Editor-in-Chief Sofia Lekka Angelopoulou. The discussion centered on intuition as a supra-rational faculty, with Moro describing it as 'above ordinary logic.' Claesson argued that intuition is not magic but an accumulation of experience accessed subconsciously during a state of flow. Mintiens contrasted Ressence's user-centered design approach with traditional watchmaking's focus on the movement, stating that coherence among ergonomics, aesthetics, and function defines a new reality for a product. The panelists advocated for mixing disciplinary DNAs—architecture, industrial design, and horology—to create product biodiversity and enduring objects that transcend categories. The talk was part of the ROOM FOR DREAMS activation, which explored how designers tap into subconscious reservoirs to create empathetic, non-disposable legacies.