Participatory design: what if we all made our own furniture?
At BASE Milano, Smarin’s design sessions turned furniture making into a collective act, proposing a new role for the designer in public life.
The week before Milan Design Week 2026, Studio Smarin did something unusual at BASE Milano: they opened a workshop, invited strangers in, and handed them tools to build the installation’s furniture.
Over several days, more than 200 people, including students, local workers, and community members, collectively assembled re-U, a modular furniture system now in daily use in BASE’s common spaces. The project not only produced something useful for the community of the space, but also the experience of making something together that none of the participants could have made alone.
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re-U by Studio Smarin:
How it works
The format, developed by Stéphanie Marin’s Nice-based studio, is simple but radical. Over several days in April, two sessions ran daily, in the afternoon and evening, each open to anyone who wanted to come. The system is called re-U, and it is made from U-shaped solid wood modules cut from barrel-making oak offcuts.
The modules combine through steel connectors and magnetic rods into an open-ended range of configurations: seating, desks, partitions, shelving, platforms, micro-architectures. Everything can be taken apart, because the point of the system is not permanence but adaptability, furniture designed to support whatever the space needs to become next.
“Cultura del progetto”
One of the studio’s key references in making re-U is Enzo Mari‘s Autoprogettazione, the 1947 manual in which the Milanese designer distributed free plans for building furniture from basic materials, teaching people how to make their own objects. Mari called the knowledge it transmitted “cultura del progetto”, project culture, which is not just skill but an understanding, an intuition about why things are shaped the way they are, what produced them, what intelligence lives in their form.
The design sessions take this principle and extend it to a collectivity. If Mari’s project focused on a single person’s experience, what happens if you put 200 of them together? They create a commons, a shared experience, and the construction of something that could not have been made otherwise.
Collective making and participatory design
It is for this reason that Marin proposes the participatory design model to broader institutions: schools, public offices, theatres, hospitals, and the entire landscape of public space furniture. While normally furniture arrives in a space fully formed, chosen by the higher-ups, and disconnected from its surroundings, a design session can reverse this logic.
“This type of process would allow institutions like public schools or social security offices a new kind of presence — a way of re-establishing a relationship with the people they serve,” says Marin. By building the furniture together, learning about it and being able to therefore fix or modify it as needed, a space like BASE becomes truly shared as well as functional.
Designing locally
Smarin has described the design effort behind the sessions as one of seeing: seeing the intersections that define a location, and understanding what object needs to be produced. The format can travel, but everything inside it is local. Each session produces furniture that could only have been made in that place, for a defined reason, by specific hands.
In the past decades, we have learned to ask where our food comes from: who grew it, where, from what soil. That knowledge changed the way we eat. We are only beginning to ask the same questions about the objects that populate our lives: where the wood was growing, who shaped it, why it’s there. And in the same way, the simple act of seeing and asking questions can change the way we move, the furniture that surrounds us, and the functionalities of the spaces we live in.
