A plate arrives at the table. At first glance, it holds what it should hold: a neat plate, balanced in color and texture. Then something catches the eye. The surface bears a visible trace: irregular, deliberate, unmistakably human. Before reaching the dining room, this item had already passed through other hands.
Presented during Milan Design Week 2026, the collaboration between Fourth Fire®the work of the Fondazione Iris Ceramica Groupand chef Davide Oldani brought ceramics and kitchen together through a simple, powerful idea: to do things together. With hands and matter, whether clay or the ingredients of a signature dish.
Quarto Fuoco® with Davide Oldani © Iris Ceramica Group
Quarto Fuoco® with Davide Oldani © Iris Ceramica Group
Quarto Fuoco® with Davide Oldani © Iris Ceramica Group
Quarto Fuoco® © Iris Ceramica Group
Quarto Fuoco® with Davide Oldani © Iris Ceramica Group
Quarto Fuoco® is an ongoing initiative by Iris Ceramica Group Foundationdesigned to support young people with disabilities and vulnerable backgrounds through ceramic decoration workshops. The project involves a network of associations, including Save the Children, with Punti Luce in Milan, Naples and Palermo, Anffas in Sassuolo and Lucca, as well as organizations such as Coopattiva, Fondazione Pangea Onlus, Maestri di Strada and Lucky Friends.
Through ceramic materialsparticipants are invited to express themselves, learn a craft, become part of a team and take part in a creative process that values autonomy, care and shared responsibility. The workshop is active all year round. the Milan Design Week project gave these objects a specific destination, bringing them into the ritual of fine dining.
During the week, ceramic tableware decorated in the inclusive workshops of Quarto Fuoco® were used during two evening events hosted at Oldani’s D’O and Olmo restaurants in Cornaredo, near Milan. The dishes accompanied four signature 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 drew attention to people and gestures that usually remain invisible. In this context, the people behind are the hands that decorate, cook, plate and serve: different roles, united by the same act of construction.
Working with Davide Oldani gives this process a natural extension. Known for his precise approach to the kitchen, where function, balance and detail are never secondary, Oldani works with food as a gestural language. In this work, the decorated plates and accompanying dishes belong to the same experience. The ceramic surface doesn’t just depict the food. It creates a rhythm around it. Color, form and decoration become part of how the dish is perceived, adding another layer to the relationship between object, ingredient and gesture.
The circularity of the work lies in this movement. It starts in the workshop, where the clay is decorated by hand. It continues in the kitchen, where the ingredients are turned into dishes. He reaches the dining room, where they both meet in front of the guest. The value of the plaque is conveyed through use, not held separately 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 who makes dishes, the person who serves. Every gesture leaves a mark on the final experience.
In Fourth Fire®ceramics become a tool of inclusion through participation. The act of decorating is part of a real process, with a real destination and a visible result. Art and beauty are treated as forms of care, not abstract values, and the object becomes a place where personal expression and collective work meet.
The social value of the project has already been recognized, including the Corporate Heritage Awards in 2022, and Quarto Fuoco® has been selected as an example of “Design for Social” for inclusion in the ADI Design Index 2025. In the context of Milan Design Week, its collaboration with Davide Oldani brings a further contact with the gastro hospital. ritual of the table.
What remains is a subtle shift in perception. A restaurant may not know every detail behind the plate in front of it, yet something is visible: a variation, a hand-painted mark, a small irregularity that resists standardization. From the pottery workshop to the kitchen, from shaping to cooking, from decorating to serving, the project shows how design can keep the traces of the people who make it.
And in these traces, the plate becomes more than tableware. A common gesture is made, which is carried up to the table.
