Design Signals Snapshot at ALCOVA: A Glimpse into Timișoara’s Industrial and Design Landscape
We are excited to announce our participation in Milan Design Week 2025 with the exhibition Design Signals Snapshot, presented at ALCOVA during Fuorisalone, April 7-13. This showcase brings together a selection of works from previous exhibitions at FABER — “Woven Secrets” (2024) and “Turn Signals – Design is Not a Dashboard” (2023) — highlighting the intersection of design, industry, and technology through the lens of Timișoara’s unique industrial heritage.
Design Signals
Design Signals is a long-term program initiated by FABER and curated by Martina Muzi that investigates the deep connections between design, industry, and technology, with a specific focus on Timișoara’s evolving industrial landscape. The program is built upon situated research within Timișoara’s productive and academic ecosystem and engages international and Romanian designers, researchers, institutions, and creative networks in an ongoing dialogue about contemporary challenges and technological advancements.
Each year, Design Signals explores a key industrial sector within Timișoara, previously focusing on automotive (2023) and textiles (2024), with chemistry (2025) as the next area of investigation. The program transforms insights from exhibitions, conferences, and workshops into long-term collaborations, products, services, and policies. Design Signals Snapshot serves as a milestone in this journey, offering an in-depth look at past explorations while setting the stage for future research.
Design Signals Snapshot
For Milan Design Week, Design Signals Snapshot curates an assembly of research-driven projects that explore design’s role in shaping industrial, technological, and societal shifts. Each project originates from a common research and production context but manifests in diverse design languages, techniques, and media, including industrial design, moving images, photography, and graphic storytelling.
The exhibition fosters a collective space for critical inquiry, presenting a mix of conceptual and material explorations that reflect on industrial infrastructures, technological processes, and labour relations. By showcasing various research methodologies and visual narratives, the exhibition invites visitors to engage not only with the finished works but also with the underlying design processes and collaborations that brought them to life.
Featured Works and Designers
The exhibition includes projects by Flora Lechner & Cristina-Sorina Stângaciu, Théophile Blandet, Jing He & Raul Ionel, Lavinia Ghimbășan / studio Nalba, Alex Todirică and Marius Vasile. These projects explore themes such as human-machine interaction in the automotive industry, repurposing industrial waste in design, economic narratives in PCB manufacturing, and the reimagining of traditional craft practices like wool production.
Each designer brings a unique perspective, emphasizing the transformative potential of design in industrial and technological contexts. From interactive installations to documentary photography, the exhibition reflects the hybrid, multidisciplinary nature of contemporary design research. The exhibition also presents two publications, “Bright Cityscapes” and “Woven Secrets” archiving backstage research, curatorial processes, and all the projects developed in the last two years within the Design Signals program.
ALCOVA / Milan Design Week
ALCOVA has established itself as a leading platform for experimental design, occupying unexpected and historically significant locations across Milan. Founded by Joseph Grima and Valentina Ciuffi, ALCOVA redefines exhibition spaces by transforming abandoned buildings and forgotten urban sites into immersive showcases for forward-thinking design. Known for its boundary-pushing curatorial approach, it provides an ideal context for Design Signals Snapshot, reinforcing the exhibition’s mission to explore the intersections between design, industry, and urban transformation.
Visit Us at Milan Design Week
Design Signals Snapshot is a continuation of FABER’s commitment to fostering critical design discourse and promoting Timișoara as a hub for design-driven research and innovation. We invite visitors to experience this diverse collection of works, engage with the narratives shaping Timișoara’s industrial identity, and explore the possibilities of design as a tool for understanding and reimagining the world around us.
Join us April 7-13, for a thought-provoking journey into the future of design, at ALCOVA, Milan, in the Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, a 19th-century architectural gem, which will once again be reactivated this year.
The exhibition is made possible with support from Azero, Azur, Banca Transilvania, Flex, Flexik, Hamilton Central Europe, LanaTerm, Pasmatex, UTT and in collaboration with Politehnica University Timișoara, UPT Campus Creativ.
