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 3D scene on the LED wall — The backdrop is a large LED wall running the photorealistic 3D scene we built in Unreal Engine: a reconstruction of the rooms of Via Brera 7, C&C Milano's historic showroom. 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 Phygimat — the "Designer of the Future" — At the center of the space, the interactive table we designed and built holds a set of cubes wrapped in C&C Milano fabrics, whose cores were 3D-printed in our Fabrication Lab — in filament and resin depending on the part. Each cube embeds an invisible marker 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 sent to 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 3D scene runs on Unreal Engine with full PBR materials and real-time lighting, driven by a dedicated stage PC and fed as a signal to the LED wall. The token cubes are read by an integrated reader built into the table surface: the fabric/surface mapping table lives on the application side, and material changes are pushed to the scene 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 interactive table, the reader electronics, and the fabric tokens — including every core 3D-printed in filament and resin — were designed and built at our Fabrication Lab, with the same tailored care the client puts into its own products. The physical LED wall was supplied and installed by a third party: our perimeter is the 3D scene that runs on it and the entire phygital system driving it.
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 Phygimat 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.
