Author Archives: Ida Torres

The Kneeling Chair From 1979 Finally Gets Its Color Moment

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Most great design doesn’t need a second chance. It gets one take to impress you, and either you connect with it or you don’t. But occasionally, a design is so fundamentally right that it earns the rare privilege of being revisited, and when that moment arrives, the update feels less like a revision and more like a long-awaited answer to a question nobody thought to ask. The VARIABLE™ Monochrome is that answer.

The original VARIABLE™ chair was designed by Norwegian industrial designer Peter Opsvik in 1979, and it landed with mixed reactions. The premise was strange by conventional furniture standards: tilt the seat forward, add a knee rest, redistribute the body’s weight, and let the spine decompress naturally. It didn’t look like a chair. It didn’t feel like sitting. But it worked, and that mattered more than aesthetics. Forty-five years later, it’s the most popular chair in the Varier collection, which tells you everything you need to know about the long game good design plays.

Designer: Peter Opsvik

Now the VARIABLE™ Monochrome takes that story a step further. This isn’t a redesign or a departure from the original. It’s a chromatic celebration of it. Varier has reimagined the chair in a palette of five distinct colorways: Forest, Poppy, Plum, Marine, and Grotto. Each one offers a seamless transition from the wooden runners to the upholstered surfaces, so the chair reads as a single sculptural object rather than a sum of separate parts. The result is that the VARIABLE™ looks, arguably for the first time, like it was designed not just to be used but to be admired. That shift matters more than it might seem.

The choice of materials is worth a mention because it adds a layer of integrity to what might otherwise read as a purely aesthetic update. The upholstery is a knitted textile made from 100% recycled polyester, sourced entirely from post-consumer plastic waste and OEKO-TEX certified. The wooden runners are beech and ash plywood, finished with a water-based lacquer. Varier backs the whole thing with a 10-year guarantee, which is a bold commitment for any furniture maker. It suggests a confidence in the design that I respect.

Opsvik’s philosophy has always been rooted in movement. Traditional chairs, the argument goes, force your body into a single fixed position and then leave you to manage the consequences. The VARIABLE™ was designed to invite variation instead, gently encouraging the sitter to shift between kneeling and more upright postures without even thinking about it. You don’t sit in this chair so much as you settle into a quiet collaboration with it. That core experience hasn’t changed. What Monochrome adds is the sense that this chair now has a personality to match its purpose.

The VARIABLE™ Monochrome was named a winner of the BIG SEE Product Design Award 2026, which feels right. Design awards tend to follow where cultural attention has already landed, and there’s been a quiet but consistent reappraisal of ergonomic furniture happening across interior design circles. The pandemic-era focus on home office setups opened up conversations about how we actually sit and what our furniture is doing to our bodies over time. Pieces like the VARIABLE™ suddenly had a wider audience ready to receive them.

Peter Opsvik passed away in 2024, making this version of his most iconic design something of a posthumous tribute as much as a commercial release. That context doesn’t change how the chair performs, of course, but it does make the whole thing feel more weighted with intention. Varier continues to work closely with his team, and the VARIABLE™ Monochrome reads as a genuinely affectionate send-off to a designer who spent his entire career asking a question most people never thought to ask: what if the chair worked for the body, and not the other way around?

It’s rare that a piece of furniture can make you rethink both how you sit and how you see a room. The VARIABLE™ Monochrome quietly does both. That’s the mark of design that was never really finished. It was just waiting for its moment in color.

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A Jewelry Artist Just Turned a 50-Cent Coin Into a World Cup Ball

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The 2026 FIFA World Cup is already one of the most logistically ambitious tournaments in the sport’s history. Three host nations. Forty-eight teams. One official ball. And now, one very tiny, very gorgeous golden replica made from spare change.

Jewelry artist Soroush JWL recently released a video documenting his process of turning 50-cent Euro coins into a miniature version of the Trionda, Adidas’ official match ball for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The result is exactly as compelling as it sounds: a palm-sized golden sphere that perfectly mirrors the Trionda’s distinctive flowing panel pattern. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but it does.

Designer: Soroush JWL

For those not yet deep in the World Cup rabbit hole, the Trionda is a ball worth knowing. Adidas unveiled it in October 2025, and its design carries real intention behind it. The name nods to the three host nations (Canada, Mexico, and the United States), while the curving four-panel form was inspired by “la ola,” the wave. It actually holds a small record: with only four panels, it’s the fewest a FIFA World Cup ball has ever used. Each panel carries iconography tied to a host country. A maple leaf for Canada. An eagle for Mexico. A star for the United States. The craftsmanship baked into the original ball already had layers of meaning long before Soroush got near it with his tools.

Which is probably part of what makes his replica so satisfying to watch take shape. He splits the coins down the middle, hammers each half into a custom mold, solders the halves together into a sphere, and then begins the painstaking work of hand-carving the Trionda’s twisting surface pattern directly into the metal. No CNC machine. No shortcuts. Just hands, tools, and a very deliberate commitment to getting every curve right.

I have a lot of appreciation for this kind of project because it does two things at once. It is a genuine craft exercise, the kind that demands patience and precision without any automated assist. And it is also a design exercise in disguise. To carve a pattern convincingly, you first have to understand it completely. Soroush had to deconstruct the Trionda’s geometry before he could reconstruct it at a fraction of its size. That level of attention to an object most people only interact with as background detail during a broadcast is, by itself, a kind of tribute.

Soroush JWL has built a following on exactly this kind of work. Previous projects have included a ring engineered to unfold into a bracelet through a series of interconnected scissor mechanisms, a miniature Aladdin’s lamp, and a bolt transformed into a sword. The common thread across all of it is a delight in transformation and an insistence on doing it by hand. His YouTube channel has grown to over 123,000 subscribers, and it is easy to understand why. Watching raw metal become something recognizable, even beautiful, hits a very specific satisfaction center in the brain that almost nothing else does.

More than the craftsmanship, though, it is the timing that makes this feel significant. The World Cup is one of those rare events that genuinely pauses the world for a few weeks and creates objects that carry collective memory. Jerseys. Stickers. Posters. The balls themselves. Soroush took one of those objects and translated it into something permanent and personal, a keepsake that will outlast the tournament by decades.

There is also something quietly ironic about the material choice. The Trionda is engineered for elite play, designed to perform under the highest standards of precision and durability on the world’s biggest stage. Soroush’s version will never see a pitch. It will sit in someone’s hand, catch the light, and make whoever holds it think about what it represents. In some ways, that is its own kind of performance. The World Cup is a design event as much as it is a sporting one. Soroush JWL just made a tiny, golden argument for that point.

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The 24-Year-Old Who Built a Life-Size Spaceship He Couldn’t Visualize

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Abel van Oirschot has aphantasia, which means his mind’s eye is permanently dark. No mental images, no visual memory, no ability to picture a face or a room or a color before committing to it physically. He is also a 24-year-old multidisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam, and his 2025 project Birch is proof that you do not need to see something in your head to build it with your hands.

What he built is an octagonal spacecraft interior, life-size, constructed entirely inside his home garage from wood, cardboard, foam, and repurposed electronics. The build photos tell the story in stages: first a bare wooden skeleton, all angular geometry and exposed joints, the eight-sided form already unmistakable even stripped to its frame. Then the panels go on, MDF sheets cut and fitted to each faceted wall, a circular porthole carved into the center. Then the detail work arrives, hand-drawn panel lines suggesting pressurized compartments, small fixtures and hardware pressed into the surface to read as instrument panels from a distance. All of it painted white, uniformly, obsessively, until the wood and cardboard underneath disappears entirely.

Designer: Abel van Oirschot

The choice to go white is not incidental. The finished interior has the quality of a cleaned-out memory, something that once held life and now holds only the traces of it. It reads almost clinical until you look closer and notice the personal details van Oirschot tucked into the design: a cluster of photographs and stickers pinned to one wall panel like a teenage mood board, photo booth strips, a Glossier sticker, ticket stubs, gold star confetti dotting the surfaces. A copy of Amy Bloom’s In Love sits propped in the corner. A yellow iPod nano rests nearby. A pale blue electric guitar leans against the porthole.

These are not set dressing in the conventional sense. They feel more like belongings, things someone brought on a very long journey with no clear destination. The tension between the cold geometry of the spacecraft and the warmth of those personal objects is where the design does its most interesting work. Van Oirschot is not trying to convince you this is a real spacecraft. He is asking you to sit with the feeling of someone who built one anyway, and why they might have needed to.

The 1960s influence runs through every decision. The porthole, the panel proportions, the rounded hatch detailing, the vintage desk lamp and chrome objects borrowed from Tom’s Vintage Shop, all of it gestures toward the Space Age aesthetic of that era, when the idea of leaving Earth was both a technological reality and a cultural obsession. That period had a very specific visual language: optimistic, geometric, forward-facing. Van Oirschot borrows it and then quietly complicates it. His astronaut is not launching toward something triumphant. He is sitting on the floor of a spacecraft that never left, holding a guitar, surrounded by the small evidence of a life lived inside.

The production photography completes the design work. Shot from slightly above and straight on, the octagonal form creates a near-perfect symmetry that makes the human figure inside it feel both central and small. The color grading shifts the warm white of the built set into something cooler and more distant, steely and grey, which gives the final images a cinematic weight the build photos do not have. The set and the photography are inseparable here. Neither would land without the other.

The whole thing, frame to final photograph, was made without any artificial intelligence involvement, funded in part by the Amarte Fonds. No digital generation, no shortcuts. Just a wooden skeleton assembled in a home living room, paneled and painted and filled with objects until it became something else entirely. It is a remarkable piece of production design for any artist. For a 24-year-old who cannot picture a single element of it in his mind beforehand, it is something harder to categorize. Call it proof that constraint, pushed far enough, stops being a limitation and starts becoming the work itself.

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Varydes Built a Steel Pen Named After Rain That Never Falls

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Pens have been essentially the same for decades. You pick one up, you write, you lose it in the bottom of your bag, and you move on. Nobody really thinks about what a pen looks like anymore because, for the most part, they all look the same. That’s exactly why Virga by Varydes stops you cold.

Designed by Kjell Semmer out of a Berlin studio, Virga is a ballpoint pen built from solid 316L stainless steel, shaped into an open lattice structure that looks less like it was engineered and more like it simply grew. The studio describes it as “grown, not manufactured,” and that’s not marketing language. When you look at the photographs, you genuinely see it. Fine steel strands weave together, pull apart, dense in some sections and open and airy in others. Rotate it even slightly in the light, and it shifts. You never quite see the same pen twice.

Designer: Kjell Semmer

The name, Virga, is borrowed from meteorology. It refers to precipitation that falls from clouds but evaporates before ever reaching the ground. Rain that exists but never lands. It’s a strange, beautiful thing to name a writing tool after, but it works. Like the weather phenomenon, Virga the pen exists somewhere between two states of form. It looks almost organic yet undeniably industrial. Precise, but it reads as wild. A piece of steel that somehow feels alive.

Functionally, Virga is straightforward and, in my opinion, that’s a smart choice. A smooth twist mechanism, a standard G2 refill, 12.7 centimeters long, and 39 grams of solid steel in your hand. It won’t disappear in your bag. You’ll know it’s there. The weight alone makes it feel like an object that matters, not a disposable instrument you swipe from a hotel reception desk.

Every piece is individually examined, assembled, and hand-polished in the Berlin studio before it ships. Varydes deliberately leaves the surface raw, honest about the metal it came from. That kind of intentional restraint is worth paying attention to. It would have been easy to buff the thing to a mirror shine and call it luxury. Instead, they stopped at the point where the steel still feels like steel. That’s a different kind of confidence.

The design falls into a category that I think deserves more attention: objects made to be owned, not just used. A G2 refill means you can use it indefinitely. Stainless steel means it won’t crack, warp, or age poorly. The 3D printing process allows the open lattice structure to exist in the first place, creating geometry that traditional machining simply couldn’t produce. So while Virga looks like sculpture, it’s also engineered to be a daily companion. Those two things usually don’t share the same sentence, and yet here we are.

It’s also worth saying that the pen space has quietly become one of the most interesting corners of design. Collectors, writers, designers, and everyday people who just like beautiful objects have built a real market around thoughtful writing instruments. Virga fits into that world comfortably, but it doesn’t look like anything else in it. Most premium pens signal luxury through traditional craftsmanship, fine materials, brand heritage. Virga arrives from a completely different angle. It signals thinking. It looks like someone asked a genuinely different question about what a pen could be and then had the ability to actually answer it.

Whether you’re the kind of person who collects objects, cares about design, or just wants to stop using pens that feel like they were never meant to last, Virga is worth watching. The name is more fitting than it might first appear. Virga is precipitation that never touches down, suspended between sky and earth. This pen lives somewhere between sculpture and tool, between wild nature and precise engineering. It occupies that space permanently, and it looks extraordinary doing it.

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Monai’s New Baby Crib Monitors Heart Rate With 4K Sensors

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Baby gear has always been functional. Safe. Practical. But design, real design, has rarely been part of the conversation when it comes to infant furniture. The Monai Sleepod Baby Crib is trying to change that, and it’s doing it with enough technology packed inside to make your phone feel a little insecure.

Designed by Wen Rui, Shi Zongjing, and Shen Jiahao for Kaiwang, a Shenzhen-based design team, the Sleepod made its debut at CES 2026 and later turned up at Milan Design Week 2026. Two events that rarely share the same audience, and showing up at both is a clear statement of intent: this is a product that wants to be taken seriously as both technology and design.

Designers: Wen Rui, Shi Zongjing, Shen Jiahao for Kaiwang

At a glance, the Sleepod looks clean and considered, more like something you’d see at a Scandinavian design fair than in the baby aisle of a big box store. Its collapsible, luggage-style frame packs down quickly with a one-button folding mechanism, making setup fast and storage genuinely easy. The adjustable bed and railing heights let the crib adapt as a baby grows, rather than becoming obsolete after a few months. For parents used to baby gear that seems designed more for showroom appeal than real daily life, those are practical wins that add up quickly.

The technology is where the Sleepod really separates itself from everything else on the nursery floor. Inside the compact frame is a stack of sensors that would feel at home in a medical monitoring setting: a 4K full-color camera with low-light imaging, millimeter-wave radar, and thermal infrared sensors. Together, they track a baby’s activity, sleep quality, breathing, heart rate, and body temperature around the clock. The camera detects covered faces and proximity to the railings, triggering alerts before a situation has a chance to become dangerous. It also reads cry patterns and monitors sleep cycles, giving parents actual data rather than anxious guesswork at 3 a.m.

There’s also a negative-ion air purification system built into the design, along with gentle audio features intended to help soothe babies to sleep. The whole system runs on full-stack, in-house AI technology, and Monai describes it as the first application of embodied intelligence in baby care, which essentially means the crib is built to understand and respond to its occupant rather than simply containing one.

As a piece of design, the Sleepod makes me think the baby furniture industry has been dramatically underestimating what a crib could be. Most cribs ask parents to do the sensing, the watching, and the worrying. The Sleepod redistributes some of that cognitive load. For anyone who has spent a night lying awake, listening for sounds that may or may not mean something, that shift in responsibility feels genuinely meaningful.

The design language is notably restrained, and that reads as a deliberate choice. Nothing here is trying to be cute or playful in the way baby products so often default to. It feels like something built for the parent as much as for the baby: calm, precise, and considered. The foldable frame and portable form suggest a team thinking about modern parenting realistically, including families who travel, move frequently, or simply don’t have space for furniture that works only one way.

The questions around always-on AI monitoring in a nursery are worth naming. Multi-sensor fusion with 4K imaging running continuously is a significant data footprint, and parents will reasonably want to know what’s being processed on the device versus what’s sent to the cloud. These are conversations the industry needs to get better at having openly as smart baby tech shifts from novelty to expectation.

Still, as an object and as an idea, the Monai Sleepod Baby Crib is a genuinely compelling piece of work. It doesn’t treat technology and furniture as two separate concerns parents have to manage on their own. It makes them one coherent thing, designed around what it actually takes to keep a small, new person safe, healthy, and sleeping well.

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Polaroid Just Upgraded the Tiny Camera Collectors Love

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There was a time when the only people you would see carrying around Polaroid cameras were the hipster film or art students or the always-on-a-nostalgic-trip enthusiasts. But now, analog cameras have become part of the lives of those who are into photography or those who just like collecting printed photos to tuck into their journals or cork boards.

Polaroid is one of those brands that has really gotten into this whole analog-digital hybrid lifestyle by consistently releasing new products that the market gobbles up. Their latest release is the Polaroid Go Generation 3, the newest iteration of this product line that brings exciting new features, fresh vibrant colorways, and even more ways to capture those memories.

Designer: Polaroid

This new version of this beloved Polaroid camera offers several new things that collectors and enthusiasts will enjoy. The biggest upgrade is that the new polycarbonate optic brings you sharper and clearer photos. I know the lo-fi nature of a lot of these analog cameras is part of the appeal, but of course, sometimes you’d still want to have something that has higher quality.

This camera, which is the world’s smallest instant analog one, now also has a better Xenon flash which performs better than the LED flashes on modern cameras when taking low-light photos. It is also able to handle lens flaring better, and the selfie mirror now also has less glare.

For collectors who are focused on the design of the camera itself, this version comes in five new vibrant colors: purple, teal, light blue, black, and white. Personally, I can’t wait to have the purple one and carry it around with its pocket-friendly dimensions.

Another upgrade worth getting excited about is the improved viewfinder. The new wider design with its elongated eyepiece lets you see your full composition comfortably, with no more awkwardly pressing your face against the camera just to frame a shot. It is a small but impactful change, especially when you’re trying to capture a spontaneous group moment and need to get the framing right on the first try. No more accidentally cut-off heads or missed expressions.

What also stays from the previous generations, and that is very much a good thing, are the beloved shooting modes. Use the self-timer for those full-group shots where everyone actually needs to be in the frame, or activate the double exposure mode for dreamy, creative layered shots that give your photos a truly artistic edge. Flash control is also all handled through a single button, keeping the whole experience intuitive and fuss-free. It is simple, fun, and exactly the kind of energy you want from a camera this size.

And for those who still want a little digital in their analog life, the Polaroid Go Gen 3 pairs nicely with the free Polaroid app. You can scan your prints and share them online, so you truly get the best of both worlds. The physical photo to stick on your wall, tuck into your journal, or swap with a friend, plus a digital copy ready to share whenever you feel like it.

The rechargeable lithium-ion battery holds up impressively too, giving you up to 15 film packs per charge, more than enough for a full weekend getaway or a long day of adventures without worrying about it dying on you at the worst possible moment. And at just $89.99, it is an accessible and very giftable entry into the world of instant analog photography.

Whether you are a die-hard Polaroid collector, a photo journaler, or someone who simply wants to step away from the overly curated world of digital photography and capture something real and unfiltered, the Polaroid Go Generation 3 is worth every penny. It is small enough to slip into a bag, beautiful enough to show off, and capable enough to make your memories look genuinely great. Big energy in the tiniest package, and honestly, is there anything more Polaroid than that?

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Harvard Students Built a Lamp That Taught a Robot to Make Art

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There are moments in design when your first thought isn’t “how does it work” but “how does it feel.” Hikarigami is one of those objects. Created by four Harvard Graduate School of Design students, Luke Fiorante, Joseph Fujinami, Annie Xing, and Chi Zhang, it’s a luminaire that looks, at first glance, like an intricate metal tower carved by a very patient and very precise hand. But the story behind it is far more interesting than the object alone, and the object itself is already extraordinary.

The name is a portmanteau of two Japanese words: hikari, meaning light, and kirigami, the traditional art of cutting and folding a single sheet of material into three-dimensional form. The fusion isn’t just poetic; it’s structural. The team took that ancient paper-craft logic and translated it into sheet aluminum, using an industrial robotic arm to press, deform, and expand the metal into a lattice of thousands of individual cells. Each cell is unique. Each one catches light differently. And every fold was made without a mold.

Designers: Luke Fiorante, Joseph Fujinami, Annie Xing, Chi Zhang

That last part is the quiet revolution tucked inside this project. Traditional metal forming depends on expensive, custom-made dies and molds, static tools that lock a design into one fixed shape and require significant capital before a single piece can be produced. Hikarigami throws that model out entirely. The team developed a custom script called Machina, which programs the robot to adjust its actuation depth for every single cell in the lattice. Because the cells vary in size across the panel, a uniform press would cause the metal to fail. The script scales the force to each cell’s geometry, working right up to the material’s yield limit without crossing it. It’s precision at a scale that a human hand simply couldn’t replicate.

But precision isn’t the point. Craft is. The team was genuinely asking whether robotic automation could learn the intuitions of handmaking: the responsiveness to material, the calibration to context, the sense that a gesture should change depending on where you are in the process. Most industrial fabrication doesn’t care about any of that. Hikarigami does. And to me, that’s the more interesting question.

The result is a tower made of six identical aluminum panels with no fasteners, no adhesives. The panels interlock through tabs built directly into the geometry, which means the whole assembly is a single material: pure aluminum, fully recyclable, and designed to age gracefully. The team noted that over time, the aluminum will develop a patina shaped by its environment. The lamp doesn’t resist change. It participates in it.

When you turn it on, the experience shifts completely. During the day, Hikarigami reads as architectural, almost industrial, the kind of object that would feel at home in a gallery or a thoughtfully designed living space. At night, with the central LED filament lit, the aluminum skin opens up. The thousands of robotically formed apertures cast overlapping pools of shadow and caustic highlights across every nearby surface. The room becomes part of the lamp. The lamp becomes the room.

It’s worth noting that this is a student project, and I find that genuinely refreshing. It won in the sustainability category at one of design’s most respected annual competitions, and it also picked up a notable distinction in furniture and lighting. For work produced inside an academic program, the level of technical and conceptual rigor here is striking. Beyond the accolades, Hikarigami feels significant because it takes a position. It argues, quietly but clearly, that sustainable design doesn’t have to mean sacrificing beauty or experimentation. That mold-free fabrication can be expressive. That a robot can be a collaborator, not a replacement.

The team divided their roles with intention: Xing led computational design and fabrication, Fiorante handled robotic toolpath programming, Fujinami managed structural assembly, and Zhang contributed to the robotic fabrication process. Together they didn’t just design a lamp. They designed a process, and the lamp emerged from it. That’s the kind of thinking that tends to outlast the object itself.

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Thailand Just Turned Food Delivery Waste Into Actual Furniture

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Most furniture with a sustainability story asks you to make a trade. You sacrifice the aesthetics for the ethics, and you call it a choice well made. The RE-UP Side Table by Thai design studio TAKEHOMEDESIGN is quietly rewriting that agreement. It is not asking you to settle. It is asking you to look at a food delivery container and actually see something beautiful. That is a harder ask than it sounds.

TAKEHOMEDESIGN, founded by designer Paphop Wongpanich and based in Bangkok, has been producing furniture that blends Thai craftsmanship with a globally informed design sensibility for over a decade. The RE-UP collection is the studio’s most pointed statement yet. The bases of these side tables are made entirely from moulded plastic waste, sourced from two material streams: polycarbonate from industrial sources, and post-consumer polypropylene pulled from food packaging and delivery containers. Thailand generates more than 2 million tons of plastic waste annually, and a significant portion of that comes from exactly the kind of single-use containers most of us forget about the moment we toss them out. TAKEHOMEDESIGN is pulling them back.

Designer: TAKEHOMEDESIGN

What makes the RE-UP particularly interesting from a design perspective is how unapologetically honest it is about its materials. The polycarbonate bases carry a frosted glass-like finish that reads as sleek and almost architectural. The polypropylene versions, on the other hand, reveal a visibly shredded texture beneath the surface, and when some of the designs are lit from within with soft internal illumination, that texture catches the light in a way that feels more like art than furniture. It is the kind of detail you would notice and then have to explain to a guest, which I think is exactly the point. Good design should give you something to say.

The tabletops bring a contrasting layer of naturalness. Options include rubberwood shaped using traditional Thai woodworking techniques, recycled UHT milk cartons (yes, really), clear tempered glass, and marble. The rubberwood itself is a byproduct of Thailand’s rubber industry, which means the sustainability thinking extends beyond just the base. For those who want a warmer tone overall, coffee grounds are used to tint the base in a mocha finish, which is either a very clever material choice or a very good piece of storytelling, possibly both.

I genuinely appreciate when design does not try to hide where it came from. There is a category of sustainable product that scrubs its origin story clean, presenting itself as simply tasteful and letting the eco credentials live quietly in a footnote. RE-UP is the opposite of that. The process is the product. The texture of the shredded plastic, the slight translucency of the base, the warm unevenness that tells you this did not come from a conventional mold. These are not flaws being forgiven. They are the design.

The collection won the BIG SEE Product Design Award 2026 in the Furniture for Living Spaces category, a European design recognition that signals this work is resonating well beyond its home market. TAKEHOMEDESIGN has also shown at the HD Expo in Las Vegas, which suggests the studio is thinking seriously about hospitality and commercial interiors alongside the residential buyer. It is the kind of traction that tends to follow studios that say something real with their work.

The RE-UP also extends into pendant lights and coffee tables, so it is not a singular statement piece floating in isolation. It is a liveable system, and that matters. A design philosophy only scales when you can actually build a room around it. For something born from a takeout container, it holds up remarkably well.

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A Moss-Covered Payphone Just Became the Voice of 2147

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Picture a payphone. Not a sleek, reimagined version, just an actual, beat-up Telefónica booth, the kind you might walk past on a Barcelona street without a second glance. Except this one is overtaken by moss. And if you pick up the handset, the Earth answers.

That’s the premise of 2147: A Voice from the Future, an interactive installation by Cris Olmedo of Divina Machina, the digital art branch of creative innovation studio QS Ventures. The piece was presented at Sónar+D, set against the medieval backdrop of the Llotja de Mar in Barcelona. That pairing alone says something: one of the oldest commercial buildings in the city, hosting an open-ended conversation with an AI that speaks on behalf of a future planet.

Designer: Cris Olmedo (Divina Machina)

The concept is disarmingly simple. You pick up the handset. The AI, voiced through an ElevenLabs system and powered by a Raspberry Pi 5 tucked inside the original booth, responds in real time as a fictional representation of the Earth. No scripts, no predefined dialogue paths, no multiple-choice menus. You take the conversation wherever you want, whether that’s climate, survival, memory, or grief. The Earth, imagined 121 years from now, has things to say. Whether you do is another matter.

What makes this work is the object itself. Olmedo didn’t design something new and purposefully futuristic. The booth kept its original Telefónica structure, its original signage, its unmistakably analog bones. Only what’s hidden inside changed. The moss slowly consuming the exterior reads like nature quietly reclaiming something that people gave up on. That tension between the obsolete and the alive does a lot of the emotional heavy lifting here, and it’s a smarter choice than any glowing interface could have been.

We tend to think of design as a forward-moving discipline, always chasing newer, faster, more capable. But 2147 asks a different question: what happens when you take something we’ve already discarded and give it a new reason to exist? The payphone is a perfect vessel for that question, precisely because it was once the most public, most democratic form of long-distance communication we had. You didn’t need an account, a plan, or a device you owned outright. Just a coin and a number to dial.

Now that infrastructure is largely gone. Olmedo took what’s left of it and filled it with something else entirely. That’s not just clever art direction. It’s a genuinely pointed observation about how we build things, discard them, and eventually recognize that the shell still has something to offer. The fact that this installation lives inside an actual retired Telefónica booth, rather than a replica, matters more than it might seem.

The year 2147 gives me pause, in the best way. It’s far enough to feel like science fiction, but close enough to feel like a countdown. It’s the kind of temporal framing that shakes you out of the comfortable haze of “we’ll deal with it later.” The Earth speaking through this installation isn’t a distant abstraction. It’s speaking through a receiver you’ve held before, in a language you already understand, about problems you’ve already heard about.

The moss is the detail I can’t stop thinking about. It reads as both beautiful and quietly alarming, the natural world slowly spreading over a structure that once represented human connection. As if the planet didn’t wait for us to sort things out. It also turns a mundane artifact into something you actually want to stop and stare at, which is half the job of any good installation. It communicates instantly and without explanation, which is exactly what good design is supposed to do.

2147: A Voice from the Future earns its concept. It’s not a payphone with AI bolted on. It’s a meditation on time, obsolescence, and the conversations we keep putting off. And the most compelling thing about it is that it asks you to start one, right now, handset in hand, with a planet that’s been waiting for you to pick up.

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Tadao Ando’s Watch Has a Leaf for an Hour Hand

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Tadao Ando is 83 years old, has won the Pritzker Prize, and has designed homes for Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, Giorgio Armani, and Kanye West. His buildings are studied in universities around the world. His name alone tends to end conversations because there really isn’t much left to say after it. So when Cauny, the historic Swiss watch brand, approached him to design a timepiece as part of their Architects of Time series, the reasonable expectation was something severe, something stripped to its bones, maybe a slab of grey with hands. What nobody expected was an apple.

The Cauny Ando is built around a single, oddly poetic idea. For years, Ando has placed green apples outside his buildings. Not as decoration, not as a quirky signature move, but as a visual metaphor tied to Samuel Ullman’s poem Youth, which holds that youth “is not a stage of life, but a movement of the heart.” An apple, unripe and bright, carrying that same tension between potential and arrival. Ando has even created a giant green apple sculpture that has traveled internationally, including to the Museum SAN in Wonju, South Korea. The fruit has been part of his personal philosophy long before it became a dial color. And that’s the thing about this watch. The concept didn’t begin in a design studio. It began in a worldview.

Designer: Tadao Ando

Ando himself described it plainly: “This watch reflects the spirit of the green apple, unripe, a little sour, yet full of promise.” He went on to say it “honors those who keep moving forward, not because they’ve arrived, but because they still believe in the light ahead.” For a man who taught himself architecture through books and independent study, no formal degree, no architecture school, and then built one of the most recognizable careers in the field purely from persistence, those words carry real weight. This isn’t brand storytelling. It reads like something he actually believes.

The watch comes in two versions. Ando Green, the more immediately striking of the two, wears that signature apple color on the dial, complete with a leaf-shaped hour hand that makes you pause the first time you notice it. It’s playful in a way that Ando’s buildings rarely are, which makes it more interesting, not less. The second version, in brushed steel, takes its cues from the exposed concrete Ando is so associated with, quiet and structural, the kind of piece you’d wear without needing anyone to recognize it.

Both run at 37.5mm, a size that works across genders and wrists without making a fuss about it. The quartz movement keeps things accessible rather than precious, and that feels intentional. Cauny has always occupied an interesting space in watchmaking, serious enough in craft but never trying to compete with the Swiss giants on their own terms. Pairing with architects rather than watchmakers has been a deliberate strategy, and it has produced consistently unusual results. Their Architects of Time series has previously included Eduardo Souto Moura and Rafael Moneo, both Pritzker laureates, suggesting the brief is less about watches and more about translating architectural thinking into something you can wear on your wrist.

With Ando, that translation feels particularly successful because the philosophy was already portable. He wasn’t adapting his aesthetic to a new medium. He was applying a belief he has been carrying around for decades, and it shows.

The broader conversation around design objects crossing disciplines gets exhausting sometimes. Not every collaboration deserves the attention it gets, and not every architect should be designing sneakers or fragrances. But occasionally, something lands right. Occasionally, the person behind the object has something genuine to say, and the object becomes a vehicle for that, rather than just a merchandise extension of a famous name.

The Cauny Ando lands right. It’s quiet without being boring, conceptual without being alienating, and rooted in something real. The green apple on your wrist isn’t a brand gimmick. It’s a reminder from a man who has spent his entire life proving that arriving is never the point.

The post Tadao Ando’s Watch Has a Leaf for an Hour Hand first appeared on Yanko Design.