ASICS turned Milan Design Week into a Retro-Futurist Sneaker Lab

by OS Staff May 4, 2026

Kinetic Playscape brings the GEL-KINETIC 2.0 to life through movement, design, and a fictional research institute built by NUOVA

At Milan Design Week, sneakers are no longer just things you look at on a plinth. They are becoming environments, experiments, and reasons to move.

For its Milan Design Week debut, ASICS SportStyle opened Kinetic Playscape at Garage 21, a three-day immersive installation created to launch the GEL-KINETIC 2.0. Designed with Los Angeles-based studio NUOVA, the space imagined a fictional ASICS research institute — part retro-futurist playground, part design lab, part movement experiment.

The experience unfolded across five rooms, each built around a different physical or emotional state. Rather than simply displaying the sneaker, ASICS invited visitors to put it on and move through the installation, turning the shoe’s design language into something bodily. The point was not just to see the technology, but to feel it underfoot.

That feels true to ASICS’ original philosophy: Anima Sana In Corpore Sano, or a sound mind in a sound body. Here, the brand’s long-running belief in the connection between movement and mental wellbeing was given a spatial form. The installation drew on the idea that even a short burst of movement — specifically 15 minutes and 9 seconds — can positively shift the mind.

At the centre of the project was the GEL-KINETIC 2.0, a silhouette developed through ASICS’ Institute of Sport Science in Kobe. The model pulls from archive references including the GEL-KINETIC 4, GEL-FRANTIC, and GEL-TORNADO lines, reworking early-2000s running codes through a more contemporary SportStyle lens. Its construction includes Scutoid GEL technology for cushioning and a TPU support cage for stability, making the shoe feel somewhere between technical runner and design object.

What made Kinetic Playscape interesting was that it avoided the usual fashion-week logic of static product worship. There was no hard sell at the end of the route; the activation was built around trial, atmosphere, and sensation, with nearby retail partners carrying the product instead. That separation made the space feel less like a shop and more like a strange little temple to movement.

NUOVA’s design added to that mood. The studio shaped the installation through a mix of Italian radical design, Japanese minimalism, and tactile futurism, creating a world where performance footwear could be understood as architecture, not just styling. A changing room, talk space, one-on-one meeting area, and sound installation curated by Mateo Garcia extended the project beyond product launch into cultural activation.