The theme of the year 2025
Touch
The Habitare 2025 theme explores our human need to experience, touch and feel things
The theme, Touch, calls for a multi-sensory exploration of spaces, harnessing genuine curiosity as part of our experience, and discovering emotion in surfaces.
A material that that you touch with curiosity. A familiar smell of flowers that moves you emotionally because it reminds you of flowers from your grandmother’s garden. A surface you want to knock on to know if it is hollow or solid. That clicking sound that reminds you of the dominoes game you played in your childhood. Your fingertips, palms, nose, and ears and the soles of your feet – they all provoke a sensation when you enter spaces and see objects.
The theme of Habitare 2025, Touch, addresses our human need to experience, touch and feel. It provides a counterforce to our increasingly digital world.
“When the world is technical and remote, we want to have things around us that feel like something.”
“The need to touch and feel is something eternally human and on the other hand, a counterforce to an increasingly digitalised society. When things evoke sensations, they are not just transient or disposable. To touch is also a precursor of curiosity. Fostering curiosity makes us imaginative and suitably adventurous”, says the creative lead at Habitare, Päivi Helander.
The theme of Touch is also derived from our need to approach spaces and objects through touch. To touch a surface, feel a material, or test the composition of something is often even more important than looking. To feel is also a form of looking at an object.
The theme calls for discovering emotion in surfaces
“Right now, it is interesting to see the return of traditional materials and manufacturing methods as part of eco-friendly interior design and building. At the same time, new materials are being developed to replace fossil or otherwise harmful materials. As a result, we get an opportunity to feel new materials, surfaces and appearances”, Helander suggests.
She hopes that interior design is not perceived as something cold and distant, but as warm and inviting. The theme calls for a multi-sensory exploration of spaces, harnessing genuine curiosity as part of our experience, and discovering emotion in surfaces. If we treated spaces and objects as if they were living beings, not things, would we have a gentler approach to them?
