Author Archives: Ida Torres

Pepsi Max’s New Can Turns Blue When It’s Cold Enough to Drink

Posted on by

Most of us don’t think twice about the can we grab from the fridge. You reach, you pop, you drink. But Pepsi Max is betting that at least some of us will stop, look twice, and maybe even squeal a little when the can in our hand starts changing colour right before our eyes.

That’s the premise behind Pepsi Max’s new Perfect Chilled variant, launched as part of the brand’s wider Pepsi Football Nation campaign ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Out of 86 million football-themed cans hitting shelves across the UK, only 150,000 carry something extra: thermochromic ink that begins to shift at 12°C and turns a full, vivid blue at 8°C, the temperature Pepsi considers optimal for drinking. In other words, the can tells you when it’s ready.

Design: Pepsi

The design itself is clean and considered. The 330ml can wears the classic black-and-white pentagon pattern of a traditional football, a smart visual shorthand that doesn’t need any explanation. It’s immediately recognisable, seasonally relevant, and works beautifully with the colour-change mechanic. The graphic language is minimal without being plain, and the blue reveal against the black-and-white base is genuinely satisfying. When that blue kicks in, it’s not subtle. It’s the kind of visual shift that makes you want to show someone standing next to you.

The Perfect Chilled variant also doubles as a prize trigger. Finding one means you’re entered into a competition where prizes include £5,000 towards a home entertainment bundle, football tickets, Pepsi Football Nation merchandise, and vouchers. So the colour change does two things at once: it signals peak drinking temperature, and it reveals whether you’re holding a winner. That’s a neat piece of design thinking, making a single moment do a lot of heavy lifting without feeling gimmicky.

I’ll admit I have a soft spot for thermochromic packaging. It made waves in mainstream consumer consciousness back in the 2000s with Coors Light’s cold-activated mountains, and various brands have been picking it up ever since. But Pepsi’s version feels more purposeful than most. Rather than just being a party trick, the temperature cue here is tied to a genuine product promise: that Pepsi Max is best at 8°C, and the can will tell you when you’ve hit it. That’s functional design, not just fun design, and the difference matters.

The scarcity piece is where the campaign gets genuinely clever. At 150,000 Perfect Chilled cans out of 86 million, the odds aren’t outrageous, but they’re not guaranteed either. It creates just enough tension to make you actually look at the packaging, which is something brands have been desperately trying to achieve in the era of eyes-down, scroll-while-shopping retail behaviour. When your product can make someone pause on the way to the checkout, you’ve done something right.

Pepsi didn’t stop at the can, either. The campaign includes a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that replaces the word “soccer” with “football” on any webpage, a nod to the ongoing, completely unresolvable debate that football fans clearly feel strongly enough about to install software over. It’s a small touch, but it speaks to the same sensibility running through the whole campaign: know your audience, and then give them something that feels made for them specifically.

Packaging rarely gets the cultural credit it deserves. It’s the thing you throw away, the design you never frame, the object that lives in your hand for about four minutes before it goes in the recycling. But at its best, it does what this Pepsi Max can does: it turns a routine moment into a small, unexpected experience. For a product that’s been on shelves since the 1990s, making a can feel exciting again is no small feat. And if the price of admission is putting your Pepsi in the fridge before a football match, well, you were probably doing that anyway.

The post Pepsi Max’s New Can Turns Blue When It’s Cold Enough to Drink first appeared on Yanko Design.

A 7-Meter Cabin in Ecuador’s Cloud Forest Just Rethought Small Living

Posted on by

Somewhere between a manifesto and a shelter, Casa 6-3 landed on the slopes above Mindo, Ecuador, and quietly started asking all the right questions about how we build, where we live, and what we’re actually willing to give up.

Built by Baquio Arquitectura, the cabin sits elevated on a triangular timber support system above the slopes of Ecuador’s Chocó cloud forest, one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. At just 7.2 meters long, it sleeps up to six people. That ratio alone is worth sitting with for a second.

Designer: Baquio Arquitectura

The structure is clad almost entirely in polycarbonate, that semi-transparent industrial material more commonly associated with greenhouse roofing than weekend retreats. Here, it does double duty: keeping the budget lean while transforming the cabin into something closer to a glowing lantern at dusk. Rain patterns, leaf shadows, and the shifting greens of the surrounding vegetation filter through the walls throughout the day, turning the interior into a kind of living light installation that you don’t have to curate because nature does it for you.

Raising the cabin off the ground was both a practical and philosophical decision. The timber stilts let the site breathe underneath, preserving the original topography without excavation or disruption. It’s a small gesture, but it matters enormously in a region where the ecosystem is as fragile as it is spectacular. The architects didn’t treat the forest as a backdrop. They treated it as a collaborator.

Polycarbonate as a material gets a bad reputation in architectural circles, often dismissed as temporary or industrial. Casa 6-3 challenges that bias directly. The cladding was chosen for its economy and ease of assembly at a remote location, but the effect it produces is genuinely atmospheric. It allows a visual and acoustic connection to the landscape rather than sealing occupants off from it. You hear the rain. You see the mist move. You feel the forest without being exposed to it, which is honestly a more sophisticated relationship with nature than most luxury eco-lodges manage with all their cantilevered decks and infinity pools.

A folding staircase, a compact timber kitchen, and a floor plan that fits six people into less than 24 feet of length are all decisions that required real discipline. It’s easy to build big. It takes considerably more skill, and perhaps more honesty, to strip a design down to its actual essentials and still make it feel livable. Casa 6-3 lands on the right side of that line.

Beyond its immediate appeal, the project was designed with change in mind. Right now, it functions as a temporary hospitality retreat, but the timber framework was built to last and to eventually support a more permanent transformation. The polycarbonate skin can be swapped out over time while the structure itself remains. It’s a building that expects to evolve, which is a design philosophy I wish more projects would adopt instead of treating “forever” as the only acceptable timeline.

The broader conversation in architecture right now is about how to build without taking so much. Low-impact construction, adaptive materials, lightweight systems, biophilic design. Casa 6-3 stands as a minimalist prototype for low-impact mountain living without making a speech about it. It doesn’t announce its sustainability credentials. It just hovers quietly above the forest floor, doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Mindo, for what it’s worth, is considered one of the best birdwatching destinations in the world, tucked into Ecuador’s western Andes with a biodiversity that borders on absurd. Placing a structure there that actively tries to minimize its footprint reads less like a design trend and more like a genuine act of respect for the land.

At 7.2 meters long and lifted off the ground on timber stilts, Casa 6-3 is the kind of project that makes you want to rethink your square footage assumptions, your material prejudices, and maybe your entire floor plan. Not every building needs to make a statement. Some just need to know when to get out of the way.

The post A 7-Meter Cabin in Ecuador’s Cloud Forest Just Rethought Small Living first appeared on Yanko Design.

Argus Just Showed Up With 20 Eyes, 20 Legs, and No Rules

Posted on by

The moment you see Argus rolling across a college lawn, you feel a kind of awe that’s equal parts scientific admiration and mild existential discomfort. It doesn’t look like a robot. It doesn’t look like anything you’ve seen before, actually. It looks like a sea urchin crossed with a fever dream, or if you’ve spent any time on the internet in the last few years, it looks exactly like what happens when someone renders a biblically accurate angel and sends it out to navigate uneven terrain.

That’s not an exaggeration. The internet made the comparison almost immediately after Duke University’s General Robotics Lab unveiled Argus, and the parallel holds up. In the Book of Ezekiel, the ophanim, a type of divine being, are described as wheels covered in eyes, seeing in all directions simultaneously. Argus, named after the Greek mythological giant with a hundred eyes, does essentially the same thing, minus the divine mandate. It has 20 legs, each one telescoping and tipped with a camera, arranged at the vertices of a regular dodecahedron. No blind spots. No preferred orientation. No front or back.

Designer: Duke University General Robotics Lab

That last part is what keeps pulling me in, design-wise. We’ve spent decades building robots that mirror the logic of our own bodies: two legs, bilateral symmetry, a definitive forward direction. It made intuitive sense. We move front-to-back, so we assumed machines should too. Argus rejects that assumption entirely. The team at Duke built it around a principle they’re calling dynamic symmetry, which refers to how uniformly a robot can accelerate in any direction. Most robots are strongest and most efficient when moving the way they were designed to move. Argus has no such preference. It moves sideways, backward, forward, and diagonally with the same ease, which sounds like a minor technical distinction until you watch it roll through rough terrain, navigate around trees, and absorb collisions without losing its course. That’s when you realize how significant the gap is.

The design precedent here matters more than it might seem. Robotics has long borrowed from nature by mimicking the shapes that evolution produced: bipedal forms for humanoids, quadruped frames for terrain bots, insect geometries for swarm machines. But Argus is borrowing something different from nature. It’s borrowing from the radial logic of starfish and sea urchins, creatures that don’t have a front because every direction is equally valid. The Duke researchers describe Argus as an “existence proof,” a demonstration that a robot built for dynamic symmetry isn’t just theoretically interesting but practically deployable. Postdoctoral researcher Boxi Xia put it directly: “It produces a robot you can deploy in the wild, on uneven ground and in clutter, even in low-gravity settings.”

Low-gravity settings. That detail is doing a lot of quiet work in this conversation. The practical applications being discussed range from disaster response and search-and-rescue operations to planetary exploration, environments where the rules of conventional locomotion break down fast and all-directional agility becomes the difference between success and failure. A humanoid robot in a collapsed building still has to worry about which way it’s facing. Argus doesn’t.

I’ll admit the design is deeply strange to look at. It is not sleek. It is not elegant in any conventional sense. It doesn’t have the clean industrial confidence of Boston Dynamics’ machines or the deliberate anthropomorphism of recent humanoid models. It looks a little chaotic, frankly, like it was assembled by someone working from a very different set of aesthetic values, someone less interested in how the thing looks than in what the thing can do. And maybe that’s the point. Beauty in engineering doesn’t always wear the shape we expect. Sometimes it rolls across a lawn on 20 legs, sees absolutely everything, and changes the conversation entirely.

Argus is the kind of design that reminds you why robotics is still worth watching. Not because of what it looks like, but because of what it means for how we think about movement, perception, and the assumptions we’ve been quietly building into machines all along.

The post Argus Just Showed Up With 20 Eyes, 20 Legs, and No Rules first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Colombian Roof Tile That Became a Desk Organizer

Posted on by

Most desk organizers are purely functional objects. You buy one because you’re tired of your keys ending up under a notebook, or because your earbuds have gone missing again for the third time this week. Utility is the promise, and usually, that’s where the conversation ends. TEJA, designed by Gustavo Rodríguez and Estefanía Agudelo of Estudio Gris in Medellín, Colombia, makes a case that it doesn’t have to.

The name is the Spanish word for a roof tile, and the reference is direct. Traditional clay tiles have shaped the rooflines of Colombian towns for centuries, their curved profiles doing exactly one thing extremely well: shedding water while creating shade. Rodríguez and Agudelo looked at that form and asked a genuinely good design question: what if you kept only what matters? The answer is TEJA. A lacquered steel surface that curves upward at both ends, resting on a solid natural wood base. The curve does the same job here that it does on a rooftop, just on a smaller, quieter scale. It keeps things from rolling away and, in doing so, gathers them.

Designers: Gustavo Rodríguez & Estefanía Agudelo (Estudio Gris)

At the center, a small circular platform rises from the surface. It’s a tiny detail that turns out to do a lot. Rings land there instead of disappearing into a drawer. An earbud case. A coin you keep forgetting to put somewhere intentional. The platform gives these small, easily lost things a designated home, and that specificity is exactly the kind of thoughtfulness that separates well-designed objects from well-marketed ones.

The piece works equally well on a desk or a dresser, which matters more than it sounds. A lot of objects are styled for one context and feel awkward in another. TEJA slides between the two without trying, because its logic is architectural rather than functional in the narrow sense. It organizes by shape, not by category.

The moment that might surprise you most is what happens when you place three of them together. Side by side, they read as a roofscape, a miniature version of the reference they were born from. The designers didn’t plan that effect. It emerged from the object’s own internal rules. That’s the mark of a design that was thought through past the obvious. Most things only reveal their full intention under a single set of conditions. TEJA shows you something new when the context shifts.

It comes in six colors: terracotta, white, calm green, blue, mustard, and beige. The first three are kept in stock; the last three are made to order. All of them are handmade in Medellín. I have a soft spot for the terracotta, partly because it’s the most honest color for an object inspired by clay tiles, and partly because that warm, muted orange reads beautifully against both light and dark surfaces without fighting for attention. The calm green and mustard are equally considered. None of the six feel trendy in the way that becomes awkward in two years.

Estudio Gris won the DesignWanted Award in Italy in 2026 with CLU, their umbrella stand, which suggests that TEJA isn’t a one-time gesture. The studio seems to have a consistent interest in translating familiar forms into objects that hold meaning without being decorative about it. That’s a harder balance to strike than it looks.

The wider question TEJA raises, at least for me, is why we keep settling for objects that only work and never mean anything. We spend a fair amount of time at our desks and dressers. The things that live on those surfaces become part of how the space feels day to day. A desk organizer that carries a genuine reference to Colombian vernacular architecture, made by hand in the city where its designers live and work, is a different kind of object than a generic tray from a home goods store. You don’t have to think about that every time you drop your keys into it. But it’s there if you do.

The post The Colombian Roof Tile That Became a Desk Organizer first appeared on Yanko Design.

Japanese Designer Just Built a Real Shelf From Rolled Paper Sheets

Posted on by

When Japanese designer Muto Yumi set out to make furniture from paper, the result was not what most people would imagine. No papier-mâché. No origami-inspired folding. No cardboard box aesthetics salvaged and called art. What she produced is a modular furniture system so structurally sound and visually precise that it makes you question almost everything you assume about material strength and decorative surface.

The project is called Pattern as Structure, and the name is not just poetic framing. It is literally the concept. Muto starts with flat sheets of paper pre-cut with holes arranged in a specific pattern. Roll that sheet tightly around itself, layer upon layer, and the paper transforms from something limp and delicate into a dense, rigid rod capable of bearing real weight. The physics of it are intuitive once explained, but watching it happen feels like a magic trick. A single sheet does nothing. Rolled and compressed, it becomes architecture.

Designer: Muto Yumi

Here is where it gets more interesting. Those pre-cut holes that look like a graphic pattern on the flat sheet? Once the paper is rolled into a rod, those holes become tunnels running through its body. They are the connection points of the whole system. Other paper rods slot through them, linking one piece to the next without glue or hardware. The pattern was never just decoration. It was always the joint, the connector, the system’s logic. The aesthetics and the engineering are the exact same thing.

That kind of design clarity is genuinely rare. Most furniture design separates surface from structure, treating them as two different problems to solve. A frame holds the load; a finish makes it beautiful. Pattern as Structure collapses that division entirely. The surface IS the structure. The decoration IS the joint. You cannot take one away without destroying the other, and that coherence is what makes the project feel so resolved.

What Muto has produced so far is a family of open shelves in varying sizes. They look clean and slightly architectural, like something you would expect to find in a gallery or a well-curated apartment. But the real achievement here is not the object itself. It is the proof of concept. Because the rods are made from printed paper sheets, the color and graphics on the surface can change infinitely without altering the construction method at all. Want a shelf in deep terracotta? Stripe patterns? Illustrated surfaces? Print the sheet differently and roll it the same way. The structural logic stays identical. The visual language can do whatever it wants.

For anyone paying attention to design right now, this matters. The conversation around sustainable materials has become crowded with beautiful ideas that fall apart under practical conditions. Paper furniture is not new, but paper furniture that is also modular, reconfigurable, and visually customizable without requiring any change to its fabrication process? That is a more sophisticated argument. It asks whether we really need virgin timber, powder-coated steel, or injection-molded plastic to make things that last and look good. Muto’s answer is apparently no.

I keep returning to the honesty of the material choice too. Paper does not pretend to be something else. It does not mimic wood grain or stone texture or metal sheen. It is exactly what it is, and somehow that straightforwardness makes the furniture more interesting, not less. The pattern on each rod is visible. You can see the rolled layers at the cut ends. The making is part of the looking.

Design that is this conceptually tight often sacrifices warmth or approachability in the process. Pattern as Structure avoids that trap. The pieces feel considered without being cold. They feel experimental without being precious. And for a project made from something as unassuming as a sheet of paper with holes punched through it, that balance is quietly remarkable. Muto Yumi is someone worth watching. Not because she is working with expensive materials or chasing spectacle. But because she is asking better questions about what furniture is actually made of, and why.

The post Japanese Designer Just Built a Real Shelf From Rolled Paper Sheets first appeared on Yanko Design.

Leica’s 220-Inch Mini Projector Wants to Replace Your TV

Posted on by

When Leica announced the Cine Compact 1, my first reaction landed somewhere between genuine curiosity and mild skepticism. Leica is a camera brand. A camera brand, the kind photographers carry like a quiet badge of honor, the kind that has defined a certain visual language for over a century. And now they want to replace my television?

Here is the thing: Leica has been making projectors since 1926. Before streaming was a concept, before most of us were born, they were already in the projection business. The Cine Compact 1 is not a prestigious camera brand drifting beyond its territory. It is one returning to an old, familiar one.

Designer: Leica

So what exactly is it? At the core, the Cine Compact 1 is a compact mini projector built around a Leica Summicron zoom lens with aspherical elements, a 0.47-inch DMD image chip, and Triple RGB laser technology. It delivers 4K resolution at up to 1,700 ANSI lumens, which is bright enough to produce a usable image in a room that is not completely blacked out. The maximum projection size is 220 inches diagonally, which is an absurd number for something small enough to sit on a coffee table.

The 360-degree rotation system is the detail I keep thinking about. Most projectors are prisoners of their setup requirements: flat surface, blank wall directly ahead, dedicated space. The Cine Compact 1 abandons that formula entirely. Wall, ceiling, anywhere in between. That flexibility is not just a convenience feature. It actually changes your relationship with watching at home. Ceiling projection during a movie night is a categorically different experience from staring at a flat panel mounted above a console.

Leica also built in their proprietary image processing technology, called Leica Image Optimization (LIO), to maintain consistent picture quality regardless of projection size or location. Pair that with Dolby Vision for contrast and brightness precision, and Dolby Digital and DTS Virtual:X for audio, and this is not a glorified slideshow device. It is a serious piece of home cinema equipment disguised as a coffee table accessory.

The design is Leica through and through: solid aluminum housing, a glass front, clean lines that read as refined rather than attention-seeking. Even switched off, it looks like it belongs on a shelf rather than something you drag out reluctantly. Its projected lifespan is 25,000 hours, which at a few hours of daily use amounts to decades of service. Smart streaming runs on VIDAA, so most of what you want to watch is accessible without plugging anything extra in.

My honest read on the Cine Compact 1 is that it is designed for a very specific kind of frustration: the one that comes from building your entire living space around a television. We spend years arranging furniture toward screens, painting walls in “TV-friendly” neutrals, negotiating actual square footage with a device that has one function. A projector like this shifts that equation. The screen exists when you need it. The room is yours the rest of the time.

Is it for everyone? No. Projectors still require more thought than a TV on a wall, and Leica’s pricing tends to reflect the brand’s premium heritage. But the people who will love this will love it unconditionally. The design-conscious person who thinks as carefully about how their space looks at two in the afternoon as they do at nine at night. The perpetually mobile person who wants a real cinema experience wherever they land. The person who is simply done negotiating living space with a large black rectangle.

Leica is not chasing a trend here. If anything, they are returning to something they were doing before most modern tech companies existed. The form is smaller, smarter, and more portable. The commitment to image quality behind it is exactly the same.

The post Leica’s 220-Inch Mini Projector Wants to Replace Your TV first appeared on Yanko Design.

Thousands of Paper Sheets, One Kiln, One $58K Prize

Posted on by

The first time I saw images of Jongjin Park’s Strata of Illusion, I genuinely could not figure out what I was looking at. It reads like a compressed canyon wall, like strata lifted from geological time, like something that took millennia to form. It does not look like something a person assembled in a studio over a matter of months. That disconnect between the familiar and the seemingly impossible is, I think, exactly the point.

Park is a Korean ceramic artist and assistant professor at Seoul Women’s University, and earlier this year he took home the 2026 LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize for Strata of Illusion, one of the most prestigious honors in contemporary craft. The prize comes with €50,000, but the work itself is worth far more attention than a check.

Designer: Jongin Park

Here is what makes it so remarkable. The sculpture is built from thousands of sheets of ordinary tissue paper. Park coats each sheet in porcelain slip mixed with hand-mixed pigments, then folds, stacks, and presses them together into a dense, rectilinear mass that resembles a partially collapsed seat. Then he fires the whole thing in a kiln. At high temperatures, the paper burns completely away. What remains is a ceramic body that has shifted, bent, and settled under its own weight and the heat, shaped not entirely by the artist’s hands but by forces the material encounters on its own.

The part of his process that genuinely floors me is the surrender in it. Park is not a sculptor in the traditional sense of someone who carves away or imposes a rigid vision onto a material. He sets up conditions. He coats the paper, arranges the layers, builds the compression, and then he cedes control to the kiln. The collapse is not an accident, but it is also not entirely planned. That charged zone between intention and surrender is exactly where Strata of Illusion lives, and it is a hard place to hold without losing your nerve.

The work also occupies a fascinating gray area between ceramics, sculpture, and design, which is part of why it travels so naturally across contexts. Park has shown at Design Miami and PAD London, and the piece feels equally at home in those collectible design spaces as it does in a fine art exhibition. A seat that cannot really be sat upon. A ceramic form that started as something you blow your nose with. A work that looks ancient but was completed last year. The contradictions stack up as deliberately as the paper layers themselves.

Park’s approach demands a kind of trust that is actually quite radical. Not just from the artist, but from the viewer too. You have to accept that the unpredictability is the craft, not the failure of it. We are so conditioned to equate mastery with perfect control that a work like this can feel destabilizing at first. That slight unease is doing something useful, though. It is making you examine what you actually value when you look at something made by hand.

The LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize has long recognized artists who use traditional craft languages to say something larger and more conceptually ambitious. Park’s win feels like a precise fit for that legacy. Strata of Illusion is not just technically extraordinary. It is philosophically loaded in a way that rewards slow, patient looking, which is increasingly rare and increasingly worth seeking out.

The exhibition featuring Park’s work alongside other shortlisted artists is on view at the National Gallery Singapore through June 14. If you happen to be anywhere near it, photographs alone will not prepare you for what the actual scale and texture of the object must feel like in person. There is a density to those compressed layers that images have no way of translating.

For the rest of us, Strata of Illusion offers a genuinely compelling answer to the question of where craft is headed. Not backward into nostalgia, not forward into pure concept. Somewhere in between, fired at high temperatures, shaped by forces no artist fully controls.

The post Thousands of Paper Sheets, One Kiln, One $58K Prize first appeared on Yanko Design.

One Revolution Per Minute: How THE MIROR Makes Time Visible

Posted on by

Most lamps exist to solve a problem: you need light, so you buy a lamp. THE MIROR Collection, by design studio MIRORlab, starts from a completely different premise. Rather than asking how to illuminate a room, it asks what light could be if it were designed to make you feel the passage of time. The answer is a kinetic lighting system that is part optical instrument, part ambient installation, and one of the more quietly radical design concepts I’ve come across in recent memory.

At its heart, THE MIROR is built around a slowly rotating light source paired with a set of six interchangeable magnetic glass lenses. Each lens contains embedded micro-patterns and textures that refract and fragment light into shifting projections across walls, ceilings, and floors. Nothing in the room physically changes. Yet from one minute to the next, the space looks and feels entirely different. The effect is genuinely mesmerizing, the kind of thing you notice out of the corner of your eye and then can’t stop watching.

Designer: MIRORlab

The detail worth dwelling on is the rotation speed: exactly one revolution per minute. That’s not an arbitrary number. It’s calibrated to align with a natural perceptual rhythm, slow enough to feel meditative rather than dizzying, but active enough that you remain aware of it at all times. The light is always doing something. It’s the design equivalent of a really good ambient soundtrack, present without being intrusive, affecting the room without demanding your full attention.

What MIRORlab is essentially arguing is that most lighting design treats time as irrelevant. You flip a switch, the room is lit, and that’s the end of the relationship. THE MIROR reframes light as a time-based medium, something that unfolds, rotates, and transforms continuously. No two projected moments are ever identical, even with the same lens. In that sense, it has less in common with conventional lighting and more in common with kinetic sculpture or generative art. The lamp isn’t just a tool for visibility. It’s a system for experiencing duration.

The six lenses, named Earth, Nebula, Dune, Bloom, Warmwhite, and Metropolis, were each developed through research into atmospheric perception and environmental light conditions. The reference points are genuinely cinematic: sunset diffusion across open landscapes, deep-space nebula imagery, solar eclipse transitions, water reflections under shifting cloud cover, and city lights seen from altitude at night. Most product designers think in finishes and colorways. MIRORlab thought in atmospheres. Swapping a lens doesn’t just adjust the quality of the light; it changes the entire emotional register of the room, and that’s a remarkable thing to get out of a piece of magnetized glass.

I think the broader cultural moment makes THE MIROR feel especially timely. We spend more time than ever in rooms that don’t change, and the relationship between a person and their living space has become both more intimate and more psychologically loaded. Design has started responding to that shift with a growing category of objects that prioritize atmosphere over function: white noise machines, scent diffusers, smart lighting systems, biophilic elements. All of them are answers to the same underlying question about how space should make us feel. THE MIROR fits cleanly into that conversation, but with a level of optical and conceptual depth that most of its peers simply don’t reach. It doesn’t just set a mood. It gives the room a sense of time passing, which is a genuinely different thing.

The more I sit with THE MIROR Collection, the less it feels like a lighting product and the more it feels like a quiet philosophical statement. It suggests that a room should move with you rather than simply surround you, that ambient experience doesn’t have to be passive, and that something as unassuming as a lamp can carry a real point of view about how we inhabit space. That’s a significant ask of a rotating glass lens. But if the projections look anything like the concept promises, it’s a completely fair one.

The post One Revolution Per Minute: How THE MIROR Makes Time Visible first appeared on Yanko Design.

RIMOWA’s Pokémon Collab Proves Nostalgia Travels Well

Posted on by

Thirty years ago, Pokémon taught an entire generation that the real adventure was the journey, not the destination. Now, RIMOWA is making that philosophy literal, and the result is one of the most covetable travel accessories of the year.

The collaboration, a Japan-exclusive capsule released on June 2, brings Pokémon-themed accessories to RIMOWA’s iconic suitcase lineup. We’re talking Poké Ball wheel sets, Pokémon-inspired luggage tags, and a limited-edition sticker set. The pieces are showcased alongside RIMOWA’s Essential line in bold Orange and Magenta, and the classic Original Cabin in Silver. If you need a moment to process how good that combination looks, take it.

Designer: RIMOWA

Collaborations between luxury brands and pop culture franchises are not new. We’ve seen high fashion shake hands with anime, streetwear collide with fine art, and sneakers morph into collector’s items worth more than a month’s rent. But the RIMOWA x Pokémon drop feels different, and not in the way that brands usually claim something is “different.” The distinction is in the credibility of both sides. RIMOWA has spent over a century building a reputation for precision engineering and design integrity. Pokémon has spent thirty years becoming one of the most enduring cultural franchises in history. When these two come together, the output isn’t just a product. It’s a statement.

The luggage tags are the quiet stars of this collection. Most people treat luggage tags as an afterthought, just a way to identify your bag on the carousel. But a Charmander or Charizard tag dangling from a polished aluminum case changes the conversation entirely. It turns your luggage into a flex, and the best kind: one that’s playful rather than pretentious. Charmander and Charizard are arguably the most beloved starter evolution line in the franchise, which means these tags carry genuine sentimental weight for anyone who spent their childhood glued to a Game Boy.

Then there are the stickers, and they matter more than you might think. RIMOWA has long encouraged travelers to use their suitcases as a canvas, a rolling record of everywhere they’ve been. The Pokémon sticker set fits that tradition naturally. It gives you something to place with intention, something that says a little about who you are before you even open your mouth at baggage claim. There’s a generational intimacy to Pokémon stickers on a luxury suitcase that feels earned rather than gimmicky.

The Poké Ball wheel sets round out the collection in the most theatrical way possible. You only really see them when the suitcase is moving, which makes the reveal almost cinematic. It’s design thinking at its most fun, and I appreciate that neither brand tried to make it subtle.

The Japan-exclusive angle is worth sitting with, though. It makes sense: Japan is the birthplace of Pokémon, and RIMOWA has a strong presence in the Asian market. A region-specific drop honors that cultural connection and keeps the collection genuinely limited. But if you’re a Pokémon fan, a RIMOWA enthusiast, or both, and you happen to not be in Japan, you’re essentially watching this happen through glass. Resale prices will be predictably painful, and that accessibility gap is the one thing that slightly dulls the shine of an otherwise excellent collaboration.

Still, Pokémon’s 30th anniversary has been a celebration done right. The franchise has rolled out collaborations across fashion, collectibles, and experiential activations throughout 2026, and the RIMOWA partnership sits at the top of that list in terms of design quality and cultural resonance. It understands its audience. It doesn’t try to be ironic or overly self-aware. It simply takes two well-crafted worlds and lets them coexist beautifully.

Good design is about making people feel something. A Charizard luggage tag on a polished aluminum suitcase makes you smile before your flight, and that’s not a small thing. Travel can be exhausting and deeply impersonal. A little bit of joy attached to your carry-on goes further than any airport lounge ever could. For collectors, this one is worth the chase. For everyone else, it’s a good reminder that luxury and nostalgia can share the same overhead bin, and sometimes, the most unexpected pairings are the ones that last.

The post RIMOWA’s Pokémon Collab Proves Nostalgia Travels Well first appeared on Yanko Design.

Seoul Has a New Shade of Cool, and It Folds Flat

Posted on by

Most urban design conversations center on permanence: the building, the plaza, the park. Fixed, costly, and slow to adapt. Seoul-based studio BKID Co is thinking differently, and the result is the Seoul Shade, a compact, foldable sunshade that quietly challenges the idea that public comfort has to be built into the ground.

BKID, founded by BongKyu Song in 2006, is the kind of studio that doesn’t stay in one lane. Song is a former Samsung designer who helped lead the design of the original Galaxy Tab. Over the years, BKID has built a portfolio that spans medical devices, car diffusers, furniture, and smart home tech, earning 13 iF Design Awards along the way and ranking number one in Korea for public design. The Seoul Shade feels very much like a continuation of that public-minded design ethos, this time applied to something deceptively simple: personal shade.

Designer: BKID Co

The concept takes the folding mechanism of a camping chair and applies it to a canopy structure sized for one to two people. Set it up in a few steps, pack it down flat, carry it with you. The whole thing is disarmingly low-tech, which is actually the point. When a design works this well without a battery or an app, you notice.

Visually, the Seoul Shade earns its place. The canopy is a stretched fabric panel held aloft by a lightweight tubular frame, and depending on the angle you catch it from, it looks like a wing, a sail, or a sculptor’s study of tension and curve. The product shots are beautiful, with users tucking themselves underneath in sandy fields and poolside terraces, which might feel aspirational to the point of absurdity, but they do communicate one thing clearly: the form has real presence. It’s not just a utility item. It looks considered.

What makes this more than a clever camping accessory is the urban application BKID has built into the concept. The studio envisions these shades deployed collectively, arranged in rows along pathways, fanned out around trees, clustered at event spaces. A single unit is practical. A fleet of them becomes temporary infrastructure, which is genuinely interesting from a city planning standpoint. Seoul’s summers are increasingly brutal, and heat-related interventions at the city scale are becoming less optional. The Seoul Shade proposes a lightweight, human-scale response that doesn’t require the city to commit to anything permanent.

There’s a part of me that wonders how this holds up in actual use. Wind is the obvious concern for any canopy-style structure that isn’t staked to the ground, and the images, as carefully styled as they are, don’t really address that. But this is still a concept, and BKID has a track record of bringing things to production in ways that account for those engineering realities. The studio describes its process as a balance between emotional aesthetics and logical engineering, which suggests they’re not ignoring the practical questions so much as staging the presentation around the vision first.

The broader appeal here, I think, is that the Seoul Shade represents a shift in how we think about personal comfort in public spaces. The expectation has long been that cities provide the shade, usually through trees that take decades to mature or structures that cost a fortune to install. Seoul Shade flips that: it says maybe comfort is portable, personalized, and doesn’t have to wait for infrastructure funding. That’s a genuinely useful reframe.

BKID has been consistent about designing objects that propose new behaviors rather than just solving obvious problems. The Seoul Shade is less about fixing shade scarcity and more about introducing the idea that public space can be made adaptive, one foldable canopy at a time. Whether it ends up being produced for mass distribution, deployed as a public event furnishing, or stays a proposal, the conversation it starts is worth having.

The post Seoul Has a New Shade of Cool, and It Folds Flat first appeared on Yanko Design.