The Challenge
C&C Milano is one of the most recognizable names in Italian high-end textiles: linen, cotton, embroidery, manufacturing tradition measured in decades. The brief for Milan Design Week 2026 was apparently contradictory: communicate a tactile materiality — that of C&C fabrics — inside a technological installation, without betraying the atelier's identity or sliding into digital-for-the-sake-of-digital.
The setting was SuperNova at Superstudio Più, under the headline Ideas between Tradition and Future. C&C Milano, as Official Partner of Superstudio, wanted a space where visitors wouldn't merely browse a sample book but become designers themselves — handling fabrics, seeing them applied to a real interior, exploring the atelier's story like turning the pages of a book.
What We Built
We built The Tactile Atelier: a phygital installation made of three devices in real-time conversation, designed to put touch back at the center of the design process.
The LED wall — The backdrop is a large LED wall reproducing the rooms of Via Brera 7 — C&C Milano's historic showroom — in photorealistic 3D. Walls, sofas, curtains, cushions: every surface is a parametric material ready to swap fabric on the fly, rendered with physically correct lighting so the textiles behave the way they would in the real space — drape, weave, sheen, shadow.
The NFC table — the "Designer of the Future" — At the center of the space, an interactive table holds a set of cubes wrapped in C&C Milano fabrics. Each cube embeds an NFC tag uniquely identifying its textile. Placing a cube onto one of the marked zones on the table — wall, drapery, sofa, cushion — the system recognizes the fabric and instantly applies it to the corresponding surface inside the 3D environment displayed on the LED wall. Visitors compose the Via Brera apartment with their own hands, and the result appears behind them at full scale and in real time.
The virtual book — Next to the table, a station hosts an interactive digital book dedicated to the brand: history, collections, manufacturing processes, macro details of the fabrics. Visitors leaf through pages with a gesture, explore collections, and dive deep into C&C Milano's material vocabulary in an editorial format crafted like a real publication.
"When digital reality surpasses imagination." — AT Superstudio Magazine, SuperNova 2026 edition
Technical Approach
The LED wall renders on Unity HDRP with full PBR materials and real-time lighting, driven by a dedicated stage PC. The token cubes are read via NFC by a reader integrated into the table surface: the fabric/surface mapping table lives on the application side, and material changes are pushed to the LED wall over the local network with a tap-to-pixel time under 50 milliseconds — instant to the eye.
The virtual book is a touch application built on our editorial brand-storytelling framework, with high-resolution assets and content management decoupled from the presentation layer — so the C&C Milano team can update it without dev support.
The whole rig — custom table, LED wall structure, electronics integration — was designed and built at our Fabrication Lab, with the same tailored care the client puts into its own products.
Impact
The Tactile Atelier was among the most-shared installations at SuperNova 2026, with strong organic coverage across social and trade press. It let C&C Milano turn a fair space into a living atelier: visitors lingered far longer than booth averages, touched the fabrics, composed their own versions of the Via Brera apartment, and walked out with a concrete sense of how those materials behave in a real interior.
The format is standardised and configurable: the NFC Material Table and the Interactive Virtual Book are now two independent capabilities of our Surface vertical, configurable for any brand that needs to tell a story of material, configuration, or editorial storytelling.
