From handmade ceramics to fine dining: a project shaped by many
At Milan Design Week 2026, Quarto Fuoco® by Fondazione Iris Ceramica Group and chef Davide Oldani presented a collaborative project where ceramic craft and fine dining converged, transforming tableware into a shared act of creation rooted in inclusion and collective authorship.
A plate arrives at the table. At first glance, it holds what it is meant to hold: a carefully composed dish, balanced in colour and texture. Then something catches the eye. The surface carries a visible trace: irregular, deliberate, unmistakably human. Before reaching the dining room, this object had already passed through other hands.
Presented during Milan Design Week 2026, the collaboration between Quarto Fuoco®, the project by Fondazione Iris Ceramica Group, and chef Davide Oldani brought together ceramics and cuisine through a simple, powerful idea: doing things together. With hands and matter, whether clay or the ingredients of a signature dish.
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Quarto Fuoco® is an ongoing initiative by Fondazione Iris Ceramica Group, designed to support young people with disabilities and fragile backgrounds through ceramic decoration workshops. The project involves a network of associations including Save the Children, with its Punti Luce in Milan, Naples and Palermo, Anffas in Sassuolo and Lucca, as well as organisations such as Coopattiva, Fondazione Pangea Onlus, Maestri di Strada and Lucky Friends.
Through ceramic materials, participants are invited to express themselves, learn a craft, become part of a group and take part in a creative process that values autonomy, care and shared responsibility. The workshop is active throughout the year; the Milan Design Week project gave those objects a specific destination, bringing them into the ritual of fine dining.
During the week, the ceramic tableware decorated within Quarto Fuoco®’s inclusive workshops was used during two evening events hosted at Oldani’s restaurants D’O and Olmo in Cornaredo, near Milan. The plates accompanied four iconic dishes from the chef’s menu, becoming part of the dining experience rather than remaining a background element.
Developed around Iris Ceramica Group’s “The Humans Behind” concept for Milan Design Week, the project shifted attention towards the people and gestures that usually remain unseen. In this context, the humans behind are the hands that decorate, cook, plate and serve: different roles, brought together by the same act of making.
The collaboration with Davide Oldani gives this process a natural extension. Known for his precise approach to cuisine, where function, balance and detail are never secondary, Oldani works with food as a language of gestures. In this project, the decorated plates and the dishes they accompany belong to the same experience. The ceramic surface does not simply illustrate the food. It creates a rhythm around it. Colour, form and decoration become part of the way the dish is perceived, adding another layer to the relationship between object, ingredient and gesture.
The circularity of the project lies in this movement. It begins in the workshop, where clay is decorated by hand. It continues in the kitchen, where ingredients are transformed into dishes. It reaches the dining room, where both meet in front of the guest. The value of the plate is carried forward through use, not kept apart as an object to be observed from a distance.
This same logic echoes the structure of a kitchen brigade. Every contribution matters: the person who decorates, the chef who composes, the team that plates, the person who serves. Each gesture leaves a mark on the final experience.
In Quarto Fuoco®, ceramics become a tool for inclusion through participation. The act of decorating is part of a real process, with a real destination and a visible outcome. Art and beauty are treated as forms of care, not as abstract values, and the object becomes a place where personal expression and collective work meet.
The project’s social value has already received recognition, including the Corporate Heritage Awards in 2022, and Quarto Fuoco® was selected as an example of “Design for Social” for inclusion in the ADI Design Index 2025. Within the context of Milan Design Week, its collaboration with Davide Oldani adds a further layer: it brings the workshop into contact with hospitality, gastronomy and the public ritual of the table.
What remains is a subtle shift in perception. A diner may not know every detail behind the plate in front of them, yet something is visible: a variation, a hand-painted mark, a small irregularity that resists standardisation. From the ceramics workshop to the kitchen, from shaping to cooking, from decorating to serving, the project shows how design can hold traces of the people who make it.
And in those traces, the plate becomes more than tableware. It becomes a shared gesture, carried all the way to the table.
