Author Archives: Ida Torres

Finally, a Smart Home You Can Control Without Your Phone

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For some years now, the idea of a smart home has been more than just science fiction. We’ve watched lights, thermostats, speakers, security systems, and countless other devices become “smarter.” One issue with these connected homes, though, is that most of their controls are app-based, meaning you always need your phone handy just to turn something on or off. That’s why a dedicated smart home hub is such a welcome idea: a control center that doesn’t live inside your phone.

The Homey Portal, created by Dutch company Athom, is a physical smart home controller with a tactile surface that helps you manage all your connected devices. It lets anyone in your household do things like turn the lights on or off, see who’s at the door, check how much energy you’re using, find out what’s playing on your speaker, and trigger various other smart functions you’ve set up.

Designer: Athom

Having a physical smart home controller can be more convenient than relying on a phone-based one, and Homey proves it with this newly launched device. It features a 2.8-inch round touchscreen wrapped in a stainless-steel rotary ring. You can tap the screen to select and toggle your smart devices on or off, then twist the rotary dial to adjust things like brightness, volume, and temperature.

There’s a lot you can do with this little hub. If you have smart lights, you can turn them on and off and then twist the dial to dim or brighten them. It can also show the real-time temperature and humidity of your room, and you can twist the dial to adjust the temperature accordingly. If you’re playing something on your smart speaker, the screen displays the artist, track, and even the album art. From there, you can twist the dial to adjust the volume or swipe on the touchscreen to skip to the next song or go back to the previous one.

You can also set up Flow-based alerts, like a reminder to water your plants or a snapshot from your doorbell camera showing who just rang the bell. If you pair the Portal with a Homey Energy Dongle or another supported energy tracker, you can even check real-time household wattage, solar yield, and the cheapest hours to run your appliances.

The device itself is small enough to mount on a wall or simply place on your desk, side table, or countertop, whichever works best for you and the people you live with. It’s designed to work with the more than 70,000 devices from 2,000-plus brands that Homey already supports, as well as the broader Homey ecosystem, including Homey Pro, Homey Pro Mini, and Homey Cloud. The Homey Portal is available for pre-order now at an introductory price of $249, with the regular price set to rise to $299 once the first batch sells out. Orders are expected to start shipping before the end of the year, and every unit comes with both a desk stand and a wall mount included in the box, so you won’t need to buy any extra accessories to set it up wherever you like.

At its core, the Homey Portal is trying to solve a problem most of us didn’t even realize we’d accepted: that “smart” homes had quietly made simple tasks more complicated. Turning on a light shouldn’t require unlocking a phone, opening an app, and tapping through menus, and the Portal brings back the simplicity of just walking up to a dial and giving it a twist.

It also solves a more personal problem, since not everyone in a household wants to install an app or learn a new system just to turn off a lamp. Because each Portal can be placed in a specific room and used by anyone who walks by, it turns the smart home into something the whole family can actually share, not just the one person who set it all up. Whether it ends up on a kitchen wall, a bedroom nightstand, or a home office desk, it’s a small device aiming to make an increasingly complicated corner of our homes feel simple again.

The post Finally, a Smart Home You Can Control Without Your Phone first appeared on Yanko Design.

This CD Player Doesn’t Hide Its Mechanism, It Puts It on Display

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If you think compact discs are a thing of the past, you probably haven’t been around a K-pop fan or a hoarder who still has their CDs from decades ago. Then there are people like me who have a stack of CDs collected over the years but no actual CD player to enjoy them on, since options that are strong on both quality and design are hard to come by.

The ClearFrame Speaker CD Player is a solid choice for anyone looking for a visually stunning player that won’t let a CD’s album art go to waste. It lets you slot the jacket art onto the front of the player so it becomes a rotating piece of wall or shelf art. Or, if you’d rather show off the mechanics, you can leave the artwork out and display the transparent body itself, watching your CD spin with all its moving (and non-moving) parts in full view.

Click Here to Buy Now: $240.00

Whenever I come across beautiful album art, I can’t help but think it’s wasted if it only ever gets seen as a tiny digital thumbnail on a streaming app. A player like the ClearFrame Speaker CD Player lets you put that kind of artwork on full display while you’re enjoying the music in your room. Seeing something that the artist, and the album art designer, worked hard on come to life while it spins gives it the justice it deserves. And if you’d rather see the clear, polycarbonate-style body become a piece of art in its own right, just take out the album cover and let it shine in all its transparent glory.

This is also an upgraded version of the original, and already popular, ClearFrame CD Player, since it now comes with a built-in speaker. That means you no longer need to hook it up to an external Bluetooth speaker or wired setup, which makes it even more flexible to display anywhere in your home. You actually have three ways to listen to your favorite CDs: through the built-in 40mm speaker, with wired headphones through the 3.5mm jack, or over Bluetooth 5.3 to external speakers or headphones if you already have a better setup you’d like to use.

Beyond the listening options, the ClearFrame Speaker CD Player was clearly designed with portability in mind. At just 454 grams (about a pound) and roughly the size of a hardcover book, it’s light enough to carry from your bedroom to your living room without a second thought. Its 1,800mAh battery gives you around six to seven hours of playback through the built-in speaker, or seven to eight hours if you’re streaming over Bluetooth, so you can enjoy a few albums back-to-back before needing to recharge via USB-C. There’s even a retro-style LED Nixie tube display that adds a warm, nostalgic touch to the whole experience, plus a 2MB SDRAM anti-shock buffer so accidental bumps won’t make your music skip.

For collectors, this player also solves a real problem: what to do with all the CDs sitting untouched in a drawer somewhere. Instead of treating them like outdated clutter, the ClearFrame gives them a reason to come back out, whether that’s a K-pop photocard-era album, a mix your best friend burned for you in high school, or a boxed set you’ve been meaning to revisit. It turns “old technology” into a genuine decor piece you’d be proud to leave out on a shelf.

If you’re looking to gift this to someone (or, let’s be honest, treat yourself), the ClearFrame Speaker CD Player comes in a few configurations depending on how you plan to display it. You can pick it up on its own, or add a wall mount, book case, or display stand, so it fits neatly into whatever corner of your home you have in mind. It isn’t the cheapest CD player on the market, but if you have a stack of CDs with nowhere to go and album art too good to keep hidden, this one earns its price tag by turning something you already own into something worth looking at every single day.

The post This CD Player Doesn’t Hide Its Mechanism, It Puts It on Display first appeared on Yanko Design.

Finally, a Compass That Works Without Opening Google Maps

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Anyone who has wandered around an unfamiliar neighborhood searching for a boutique that Google Maps insists is “on your left” when it is actually tucked behind a parking garage knows the specific frustration I am talking about. Small, independent stores rarely have the budget for a flashy storefront, and a pin on a map that is close enough to be tantalizing and far enough to be maddening is usually all you get. A Pow Studio designed something to fix exactly that: a small NFC-embedded fixture called the Navigation Tool that turns a single phone tap into a live compass, guiding you down the block to a physical destination without asking you to download anything.

That solves the first problem. The second one is subtler but just as real. Even after you find the store and walk through the door, most brands have no clean way to hand you off to their digital world. You try something on, feel vaguely inspired, and leave with no easy path to the website, the product specs, or the broader catalog. The Navigation Tool closes that gap too. The same NFC chip, this time embedded into the store’s hanging display system, redirects your phone tap to an online page loaded with product details and brand information. Two taps, two problems solved, zero apps required.

Designer: A Pow Studio

The mechanics are genuinely elegant. Outside, you tap your phone on the tool and a search bar appears asking for the coordinates of your destination. The system pulls from Location-Based Services and your phone’s built-in gyroscope to calculate real-time distance and direction, then renders everything as a clean, minimal compass interface on your screen. MagSafe compatibility is built in so the phone can physically attach to the tool while you navigate, which is a small detail but the kind that signals someone actually thought about what your hands are doing when you are half-lost and moving.

No app to download, no QR code cluttering a window decal, no clunky onboarding screen asking you to create an account you will use exactly once. You tap, and it works, the same quiet mechanism already living in Apple Pay or a subway fare card, just pointed at a completely different problem. American shoppers are already fluent in tap-to-pay and tap-to-unlock behavior, so repurposing that same gesture for navigation feels less like a gimmick and more like an overdue extension of something we already trust.

It also lands at an interesting moment for retail. Brick-and-mortar shopping has been quietly reasserting itself as something people actually want, not just tolerate, but brands still need their physical spaces to feed the digital ecosystem that keeps the business running. A tool like this treats the store not as a dead end or a photo backdrop but as one stop in a longer, connected journey. That feels like a more honest way to think about retail design than another Instagram wall ever could.

The visual language matches the intention. The compass interface on screen is stripped back to the point of being almost architectural: a circle, a crosshair, a tilt reading, a direction bearing. Nothing decorative, nothing unnecessary. It looks like something a navigator or a cinematographer would recognize before a tech blogger would, which feels right. Precise without being cold, minimal without being precious.

I do wonder about scale. A single boutique installing this is a lovely, considered gesture. A mall trying to retrofit hundreds of storefronts with individual NFC compass units is a different logistical conversation entirely, and I am not convinced every brand needs this level of ceremony just to get someone through the door. But as a proof of concept, it is a genuinely smart answer to a problem most retailers pretend does not exist. Sometimes the best design solution is not a flashier app. It is a small, physical object that refuses to overcomplicate the walk from curiosity to the front door.

The post Finally, a Compass That Works Without Opening Google Maps first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Ceramic Lamp That Refuses to Stay the Same

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Most lamps ask you to commit. You pick a shade, a finish, a mood, and that’s what you’re stuck with until the bulb burns out or you get sick of it and drag the whole thing to a donation bin. For anyone who likes to rearrange a room the way some people rearrange their playlists, that’s a real limitation, and it’s one nobody really talks about because we’ve just accepted lighting as a fixed decision rather than a flexible one.

Seoul-based designer Byunggwon Na looked at that problem and did something refreshingly simple about it. His new piece, ALIT, is a lamp built from two honest materials, slip-cast ceramic and solid wood, and it’s designed so the ceramic shade can be lifted off and swapped for another one entirely. The wooden column stays put. The ceramic changes. One base, endless personalities.

Designer: Byunggwon Na

I’ll admit I’m a sucker for objects that do more with less, and ALIT is a good example of that instinct done right. It isn’t trying to be smart, connected, or app-controlled, which honestly feels like the correct move in a market saturated with lighting products chasing the “smart home” label. Instead, Na leaned into contrast: the coolness of ceramic against the warmth of wood, the matte against the grain, the handmade against the geometric. The square wooden column reads almost architectural, a quiet, upright form that could disappear into a Scandinavian-leaning living room or a mid-century one just as easily. The ceramic shade sitting on top is where the personality lives, and because it’s removable, that personality isn’t permanent.

This piece treats color and light together, not separately. A pale, unglazed ceramic shade lets light spill out soft and even, almost like paper. A darker or glazed version holds the light closer, letting it glow through in patches instead of flooding the room. So the same base lamp can go from a reading-corner glow to something moodier for a dinner table, just by switching the top. That’s not a gimmick. That’s actual utility dressed up as good design, and those two things don’t always travel together.

American interiors have leaned hard into modularity over the past few years, from sectional sofas you can rearrange endlessly to shelving systems that grow with you. Lighting has lagged behind that trend, still mostly sold as one fixed object per mood. ALIT fits into where the category is quietly heading: fewer disposable purchases, more pieces designed to be lived with and adjusted rather than replaced. For a design market that talks a lot about sustainability but rarely builds it into something this tactile, that matters.

There’s also something to be said for the fact that Na didn’t overcomplicate the engineering. No magnets, no proprietary mounts, no fragile clip system to break after six months. The shade simply rests on the column, held by gravity and good proportions. It’s the kind of restraint that separates designers who understand materials from those who just decorate around them.

I don’t think ALIT is going to reinvent the lighting industry, and I don’t think it’s trying to. What it does is solve a small, specific annoyance, the fact that changing a lamp’s mood usually means buying a whole new lamp, and it solves it with a design vocabulary that feels considered rather than trend-chasing. In a category full of objects competing for attention, ALIT seems more interested in earning a long-term place in a room. That’s a rarer ambition than it should be, whether this one ends up in a Seoul studio or an apartment in Brooklyn.

The post A Ceramic Lamp That Refuses to Stay the Same first appeared on Yanko Design.

Nobody Expected a Toaster Shaped Like a Sleeping Corgi

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Small kitchen appliances have a design problem nobody talks about enough. They are boxy, beige, and built to disappear into a countertop rather than earn a place on it. A toaster’s entire personality, for most of modern history, has been two slots and a lever. That’s fine for function, but it leaves a strange gap in a kitchen otherwise filled with objects people actually chose to love, the ceramic mugs, the patterned dish towels, the vintage cutting board. The toaster just sits there, doing its job and asking for nothing in return, including attention.

That gap is exactly what a new concept from designer Kwanghyun Kim seems to fill. Rather than dressing up a standard rectangle, the design reimagines the entire toaster as a corgi lying down in that classic “sploot” position dogs do when they’ve fully given up on being dignified. The bread doesn’t pop out of a slot on the front. It rises from a channel built into the dog’s back, right between two folded ears, so the toast looks like it’s emerging from the animal itself.

Designer: Kwanghyun Kim

The proportions are what sell it. This isn’t a toaster with dog ears glued on as an afterthought. The body is low and rounded like an actual sleeping corgi, front paws tucked forward, a stub of a tail curled up at the rear that doubles as a handle. The classic black, white, and tan corgi coat gets translated into the plastic shell itself, with a white muzzle and belly wrapping around a darker back, so the color-blocking does the work that most toasters try to fake with a chrome finish.

Flip it over and the design gets more serious. The underside carries actual certification markings, voltage ratings, and a wattage spec, plus a small note crediting the Royal College of Art in London. That detail matters. This reads less like a novelty gadget rendered for internet clicks and more like a legitimate industrial design exercise, the kind where a student has to prove the concept could survive contact with an actual electrical inspector. A cutaway render backs that up, showing a completely standard toasting mechanism, heating coils, crumb tray, spring-loaded carriage, tucked neatly inside the dog-shaped shell. The whimsy is on the outside. The engineering underneath refuses to cut corners.

There’s a branding touch too. A small crown logo sits near the toast slot under the name ROANG, a nod that isn’t subtle once you remember corgis have been tied to British royalty since Queen Elizabeth II kept a small army of them at the palace. It’s a clever bit of storytelling that gives the object a lineage instead of just a punchline.

What actually makes this design smart, rather than just cute, is the restraint. There are no blinking lights, no sensors, no app pairing required. The dog doesn’t move or react. It just sits on the counter, shaped like something you’d want to pet, and does the one thing a toaster is supposed to do. The renders show it in a full lineup of colors, pink, red, mustard yellow, lavender, powder blue, each keeping the same white paws and muzzle, which suggests the designer is thinking about this as a real product line and not a one-off stunt.

Kitchens have quietly been ready for this kind of object for a while now. Look at how fast novelty shapes took over other categories, the cloud-shaped humidifiers, the frog-shaped desk lamps, the countless AirPods cases shaped like fruit. We’ve already decided small objects are allowed to be adorable. Appliances that actually cook or heat something have mostly been left out of that shift, treated as too technical to also be charming.

A toaster shaped like a napping dog won’t change how anyone’s morning actually goes. The bread still takes the same two minutes. But it changes what you look at while you wait, and that’s a fair trade for a piece of hardware that used to ask for nothing and, in return, gave nothing back.

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The Drawer That Actually Becomes 5 Portable Trays

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Most storage furniture in an American home falls into one of two categories: too heavy to move without hurting yourself, or too flimsy to trust with anything heavier than folded T-shirts. You buy a dresser, it picks a room, and it stays there until you sell the house or drag it to the curb. There is rarely a middle option, something built to be light, mobile, and honest about the fact that furniture should adapt to how people actually live, not the other way around.

That gap is exactly where Keiji Ashizawa’s “Bon Drawer” sits, even though it was designed back in 2012 and never made it past the prototype stage. The piece is a lightweight steel frame on two wheels holding five stacked trays veneered in oak, and “bon” is simply the word for tray in Japanese, which tells you most of what you need to know about the concept. Pull a tray out of the frame and it stops being a drawer entirely. It becomes an object you can carry across a room, set on a table, hand to a guest. Push it back in and the frame does its job again, quietly, without asking for credit.

Designer: Keiji Ashizawa

I like that Ashizawa came to this from an unusual angle. He trained as an architect but spent time early on at a metalworking shop that made furniture and lighting, and you can feel that in how sparingly steel gets used here. The rail system is nothing more than a flat bar attached to gestural side supports, with small stops so the trays do not slide out when the whole unit gets tipped back onto its wheels for moving. No hidden mechanisms, no soft-close hardware, no reason to call a repair person in five years. The frame even comes apart for flat storage, which is a small detail that says a lot about how the whole thing was thought through from the start rather than bolted on at the end.

What strikes me is how differently we tend to approach the same problem. American design has spent the last decade chasing modularity through plastic bins, stackable cubes, and closet systems sold in kits. Functional, sure, but rarely something you would want visible in a living room. Bon Drawer solves the same problem of flexible storage without pretending the solution has to look disposable. It reads more like a piece of furniture that happens to be practical than a storage product that happens to look nice.

The part of this story that stayed with me is that it never got made. Ashizawa had it prototyped through Tanseisya and then it sat, undocumented outside a handful of design blogs, for over a decade, until Core77 resurfaced it late last month alongside a sibling piece called SLYBOX. Fourteen years is a long time for a good idea to wait for its moment, and I do not think that delay says anything bad about the design. If anything, it says something about how manufacturing decisions rarely track with how clever an idea actually is. Plenty of forgettable furniture gets mass produced every year. Plenty of smart, useful pieces sit in a portfolio because nobody made the case for them at the right time to the right buyer.

There is a reason Japanese design keeps finding new audiences in America right now, from Muji’s steady expansion to the wave of minimalist kitchenware showing up in design-forward apartments from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. It is not really about aesthetics. It is about restraint as a design principle, about trusting that a good idea does not need extra material to prove it is finished. Bon Drawer never sold a single unit, and it still manages to say more about smart storage than most of what is actually on the market. That is worth sitting with for a moment, especially the next time you are hauling a dresser up a narrow staircase and wondering why furniture has to be this heavy in the first place.

The post The Drawer That Actually Becomes 5 Portable Trays first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Tile System That Finally Ends Ugly Corner Seams

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Every home renovation eventually runs into the same unglamorous moment: the corner. You pick the perfect subway tile, the right grout color, the exact sheen you wanted, and then you hit a wall edge or a shower bench, and suddenly there’s a metal trim strip or a mitered cut that never quite lines up. That gap, the visible seam where two tiled surfaces meet at an angle, is the actual problem here. It’s the detail contractors work around and homeowners quietly learn to live with, because until now, nobody made tile designed to solve it.

Three Dutch industrial designers apparently got tired of that compromise decades before it became a talking point in American renovation circles. Arnout Visser, Erik Jan Kwakkel and Peter van der Jagt first sketched the idea in the 1990s, then spent years refining it before launching their brand, DTILE, in 2010. Their fix wasn’t a new glaze or a trendy shape, it was going after the transition itself: instead of making flat tiles and leaving corners, edges and curves to whoever installs them, why not design those connecting pieces as part of the system from the start?

Designers: Arnout Visser, Erik Jan Kwakkel and Peter van der Jagt

DTILE’s collection includes curved pieces, corner pieces, edge pieces and dedicated transition tiles that let a tiled surface wrap around a three-dimensional shape without a single trim strip or exposed seam. A tiled bench curves into a tiled wall. A shelf grows directly out of the surface, tiled in the same material, with no caulk line announcing where one plane ends and another begins. There are even utility tiles built to house hooks, vents, electrical outlets and small drawers, so the practical guts of a bathroom or kitchen disappear into the same continuous surface as the decorative tile itself.

I think what makes this genuinely interesting isn’t the curves, it’s the restraint behind them. A lot of “innovative” tile products lean on flashy glazes or novelty shapes to justify their price tag. DTILE’s whole pitch is about removing something instead of adding it: removing the visual noise of trim, removing the awkward grout lines where two tile runs meet at an angle, removing the little compromises that every tiler quietly accepts as unavoidable. That’s a much harder problem to solve than a pretty pattern, and it shows a level of patience you don’t see often in a category that mostly competes on color drops and moodboard aesthetics.

It also fits a shift I’ve noticed in how Americans are approaching renovation right now. Open shelving, curved vanities, integrated niches, the whole “quiet luxury” aesthetic that’s dominated design media the past couple of years, all of it depends on surfaces reading as seamless. A trim strip breaks that spell instantly. DTILE essentially manufactures the illusion that high-end designers have been faking with expensive custom millwork and slab material. If a system like this makes its way into more US bathroom remodels, it could change how contractors price out anything involving a curve or a corner, because the workaround stops being a workaround.

The trio didn’t stop at design either. They built their own factory in Velp, in the Netherlands, with a high-pressure ceramic press that lets them cast these irregular shapes at a scale a small design studio usually can’t manage. That in-house manufacturing decision is part of why the product now ships to more than fifty countries instead of staying a clever concept in a design school portfolio. Plenty of good ideas die in the prototype phase because nobody wants to deal with production. This one didn’t, and that persistence is honestly more impressive to me than the tiles themselves.

None of this means DTILE is about to show up at your neighborhood tile showroom next weekend. Specialty systems like this tend to arrive in the US through high-end architecture firms and boutique importers long before they hit big box retailers, if they ever do. But the underlying idea, that the ugliest, most compromised parts of a build deserve as much design attention as the parts everyone photographs, is worth paying attention to regardless of what’s sitting in your local Home Depot aisle. The corner seam has been a fact of life in tiling for as long as tile has existed. This is the first system I’ve seen actually end it.

The post The Tile System That Finally Ends Ugly Corner Seams first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Fan Actually Designed Man City’s Third Kit With Puma’s AI Platform

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No matter how you feel about generative artificial intelligence, you can’t deny the fact that it has democratized creativity. Whether you have design experience or an art background, or neither, you now have tools you can use to bring your creative juices to life. Popular English club Manchester City and PUMA developed a platform to help fans express their fandom through original kit designs, and now they’ve actually let one lucky fan’s concept become the club’s official third kit.

Manchester City’s 2026/27 Third Kit is the first AI-generated fan design to be worn by a professional football club on the pitch and sold commercially. It was created using the PUMA AI Creator, a tool that turns written prompts into full kit designs in just a few seconds. Lifelong Manchester City fan and photographer Elliott Lacey’s creation was chosen from more than 180,000 designs submitted on the platform.

Designer: Elliott Lacey and PUMA

For those not familiar with football (soccer, to American audiences), a club’s third kit is just as important as its home and away kits, and it sometimes even outsells the two, provided it’s well designed, of course. Lacey used the platform to design his submission during his lunch break, and PUMA brought it to life with the brand’s signature quality. The project reflects a broader push by the sportswear brand to blend technology, football culture, and fan community in a way that hasn’t really been attempted before at this level of professional sports.

The design itself features a white base split by a central two-tone sash in sky blue and dark navy, finished with a gradient technique that shifts the pattern’s dimension depending on the light and viewing angle. Manchester City fans are used to seeing the club sporting an almost pure sky-blue kit, so this white base with blue accents, while still very much true to the club’s identity, feels like a refreshing twist.

What makes this launch even more compelling is the scale of fan involvement behind it. Over 180,000 designs were submitted through the PUMA AI Creator, generating 1.7 million platform ratings from supporters worldwide before the field was narrowed down to a final ten for a public vote. That kind of grassroots participation shows this wasn’t just a marketing gimmick, it was a genuine, global collaboration between a club and the people who love it most.

Manchester City’s marketing leadership framed the project as an extension of the deep bond between the club and its global fanbase, describing the initiative as a way of turning ordinary supporters into designers for a day, with AI as the bridge that made it possible. On the PUMA side, leadership described the collaboration as sitting squarely at the intersection of technology, football, and community, a rare combination that doesn’t come together often in professional sports branding.

For Lacey himself, the experience was described as surreal and deeply personal. Having grown up as a City supporter, he never expected that a design he put together on a lunch break would end up gracing the shirts of the players he idolized. It’s the kind of story that turns an everyday supporter into part of club history, and it’s exactly the sort of narrative that makes this kit special beyond its good looks.

For collectors, this kit represents something more than fresh apparel for the upcoming season. It’s a cultural milestone, the first tangible proof that AI-assisted design can move from novelty experiment to something worn by elite athletes and cherished by fans around the world. Owning one means owning a piece of a genuine “first” in sports history, not just another seasonal jersey.

Whether you’re a die-hard Cityzen, a design enthusiast curious about where AI creativity is headed, or simply someone who appreciates a good underdog story, this kit checks every box. It’s proof that passion, paired with the right tools, can turn an ordinary lunch break into a legacy moment. And as more clubs watch how enthusiastically fans embraced this process, don’t be surprised if Elliott Lacey’s story becomes the blueprint for how sports brands invite their communities into the creative process for years to come.

The post A Fan Actually Designed Man City’s Third Kit With Puma’s AI Platform first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Tower That Finally Builds Around Its Forest Instead of Over It

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Most residential towers in America solve one problem and create three more. They stack people vertically, sell the view as the amenity, and call it a day. What gets lost is everything that used to make a neighborhood feel like one: the corner bodega, the shade tree you actually stop under, the sense that your building belongs to the land instead of just occupying it. Walk through most new luxury developments in Miami, Austin, or Denver and you’ll notice the same pattern. The site gets cleared first, then the glass box goes up, then a landscaper is hired to fake back some greenery for the marketing renders.

There’s a second, quieter problem underneath that one. Architecture awards, and honestly most architecture headlines, tend to celebrate the towers rich people buy, not the housing most people actually need. Middle-income buyers get squeezed out of both the conversation and the design attention. So when a project comes along that’s built specifically for that gap, and wins on merit rather than price tag, it’s worth paying attention to.

Designer: Carazo Arquitectura

That’s what makes LTR1 interesting. Designed by Carazo Arquitectura, a Costa Rica-based studio working across Latin America, the project sits in Nuevo Cuscatlán, in the metropolitan area of San Salvador, El Salvador. It’s a 60,265-square-meter mixed-use development with more than 400 middle-income homes, and it just won both the Jury Winner and Popular Choice Winner titles at the 14th Annual Architizer A+Awards, in the Unbuilt Multi-Unit Housing category for buildings over ten floors. Winning both isn’t common. It means the critics and the public actually agreed on something for once.

The reason they agreed is right there in the plan. Instead of clearing the site, Carazo Arquitectura designed a curved tower that wraps around an existing forest, letting the preserved landscape organize the whole building rather than sitting beside it as decoration. Housing, retail, restaurants, coworking space, wellness facilities, and public gardens are folded into the same structure, stacked and threaded around the trees instead of over them. It reads less like a building with a view and more like a neighborhood that happens to be vertical.

I’ll admit I’m a sucker for a building that pays attention to where it’s standing. The roofline isn’t arbitrary either. The architects photographed the profiles of El Picacho peak and the San Salvador Volcano from the site and translated those silhouettes into the building’s geometry, so the tower is quite literally shaped by the mountains around it. Carazo calls this research framework Tropical Vertical Urbanism, which is a mouthful, but the idea underneath it is simple: dense vertical living doesn’t have to mean cutting a place off from its own climate and terrain.

None of this should feel foreign to an American audience. We’re having the exact same argument here, about missing middle housing, about whether density has to mean sterility, about whether remote work and wellness culture deserve real architectural space instead of a gym in the basement. LTR1 answers all three at once without turning into a manifesto. It just builds coworking and wellness into the tower the same way it builds in the forest, as infrastructure, not amenity.

The project hasn’t broken ground yet, and I won’t pretend an unbuilt tower changes housing policy. But juries and the public rarely agree on the same building unless it’s touching something real. What LTR1 gets right is refusing the trade-off everyone assumes is necessary, that you either get density or you get nature, that you either build for the middle class or you build for awards. A forest that survives the construction of four hundred homes around it is a small, specific kind of promise. It’s the kind worth watching to see if it actually gets kept.

The post A Tower That Finally Builds Around Its Forest Instead of Over It first appeared on Yanko Design.

Finally, Learning Robotics Doesn’t Cost a Five-Figure Lab

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For most of the last decade, if you wanted to actually build and train a robot, you needed one of three things: a university lab, a five-figure budget, or a job at a tech company willing to foot the bill. The tools existed, but the entry price kept ordinary curious people locked out of the room. That gap between “I want to understand AI in the physical world” and “I can actually afford to try it” has been the quiet, unglamorous problem holding back a whole generation of hobbyist roboticists.

Microduck, the new pre-order from French robotics company Pollen Robotics and AI platform Hugging Face, closes that gap for $399. It is a 25-centimeter biped that walks, sits, crouches, picks small objects up with its beak, and gets back up on its own after a fall. It even roller-skates. Under a shell built with 15 motors, a camera, a depth sensor, and two IMUs, it runs on fully open-source software, which means you are not just buying a cute desk companion, you are buying a real, hackable platform for training reinforcement learning models on hardware you can hold in one hand.

Designer: Pollen Robotics

Pollen Robotics is not new to this space. Last year the team launched Reachy Mini, a small desktop robot built purely for face-to-face interaction, and more than 10,000 of them found homes with developers and tinkerers around the world. Microduck is what happened when that same team asked a different question: what if the robot did not stay on the desk at all, but actually moved through your house? That shift from stationary companion to mobile, fallible, get-back-up-and-try-again machine is, to me, the more honest representation of what learning robotics actually looks like. Real robots fall down. Good ones figure out how to stand back up.

I will admit the duck framing initially struck me as a marketing gimmick, the kind of cute mascot skin slapped onto serious tech to make it more shareable. But the more I read about the design choices, the articulated beak that doubles as a gripper, the roller-skate foot swap, the four soft colorways named Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky, the more it felt deliberate rather than decorative. A humanoid robot falling over looks like failure. A duck robot falling over and waddling back up looks like a duck being a duck. That emotional permission to fail without embarrassment might be the smartest design decision in the entire product, because it lowers the psychological barrier to experimentation just as much as the price tag lowers the financial one.

Weighing in under 800 grams and priced before taxes and shipping, Microduck ships to North America, Europe, and the UK before Christmas 2026. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue called it part of an effort to “democratize physical AI and world models,” and whatever you think of Silicon Valley mission statements, the market response backed it up fast. Within roughly a day of pre-orders opening, demand reportedly pushed sales past the $26 million mark and the duck went to backorder. That is not a niche hobbyist purchase pattern. That is a signal that a lot of Americans, tech-curious but priced out of serious robotics until now, were simply waiting for an affordable, unintimidating way in.

There is a broader mood shift happening in how the country talks about AI right now, somewhere between exhausted and skeptical, tired of chatbots that talk in circles and promises that never quite land in the real world. Microduck feels like a small, tangible answer to that fatigue. You cannot hug a language model or watch it recover from a stumble. You can with this. For $399, families, students, and weekend tinkerers get a genuine on-ramp to physical AI, not a toy pretending to be smart, but a real machine willing to be clumsy in front of you while it learns.

Pollen Robotics has been upfront that Microduck will not solve robotics’ hardest problems, and it should not have to. What it offers instead is something rarer than a breakthrough: a starting point that is actually within reach.

The post Finally, Learning Robotics Doesn’t Cost a Five-Figure Lab first appeared on Yanko Design.