Dutch beer brand Heineken has opened a pop-up nightclub at last month's Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan's annual furniture fair.
The temporary venue, which opened last night and will stay open until Friday, is the result of a year-long project which gave 19 young and emerging designers the brief to create 'the nightclub of the future'.
Heineken auditioned hundreds of promising designers for the project, eventually selecting 19 from four countries: Japan, Brazil, USA and Italy. The company then put the designers into groups led by mentors including product designer Henk Stallinga and fashion designer Kim Leemans.
The 19, which come from product design, graphic design, motion design and interior design backgrounds, then took on different elements of the club's design, and they also opened up the creative process to hundreds of clubbers through social networking sites.
The design focuses on several key areas and activities, including an interactive bar which uses a digital image of a bottle filling up to let the bartender know how long a customer has been waiting, and video mapping technology, which creates a sense of interaction between the crowd and the DJ.
Mark van Iterson, head of global design at Heineken said: 'Clubs are really interesting spaces for us to explore new design ideas, as they're social, extrovert and progressive places where design really sets the scene for the nightlife experience. We set out to experiment with ways of making the night more welcoming, more memorable and igniting conversation through design concepts and innovations.'
