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.
Wood that you cannot stop stroking because it feels so smooth. A nice, familiar smell that moves you because it reminds you of your grandmother. A surface you want to knock on to know if it is hollow or solid. A piece of material that makes a clicking sound that reminds you of the dominoes games you played in your childhood. Your fingertips, palm, nose, and ears, and the soles of your feet – they all give you sensations when you see spaces and objects.
The theme of Habitare 2025, Touch, addresses our human need to experience, touch and feel things. 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.”
“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, on the one hand, 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. Touching is also a harbinger 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. Touching a surface, feeling a material, or testing the feel of something is often even more important than looking. Feeling 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 very 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 completely new kinds of materials, surfaces and appearances”, Helander suggests.
She hopes that interior design is not perceived as something cold and distant, but as intimate 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 people and not things, would we have a gentler approach to them?
