Tag Archives: Events

A Copper-Wax Lamp Revives a Slovak Forge and Glows Like Stained Glass

Posted on by

Industrial heritage sites have a way of disappearing quietly. The machinery goes silent, the workers move on, and the buildings either get repurposed or left to rust. What rarely survives is the craft knowledge, the particular way a community understood and worked a material. Slovakia’s copper-processing history is one of those stories, rooted in a small central region that once hummed with the sounds of metalwork and fire.

That’s the history Laura Zolnianska, a student at the Slovak University of Technology’s Faculty of Architecture and Design, decided to pull back into the present. Exhibited at BASE Milano as part of the 2026 Fuorisalone UNFOLD showcase, Echoes of Copper is a lamp collection drawing from the copper-processing traditions of Medený Hamor in central Slovakia, combining them with digital fabrication and an entirely experimental material of her own development.

Designer: Laura Zolnianska (Slovak University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture and Design)

The material is the most interesting part. Zolnianska created a copper-wax composite that forms the shades, a substance that behaves differently every time it’s worked. Some shades come out smooth and disc-like, with swirling oxidation patterns that look almost planetary when lit. Others emerge heavily textured and volcanic, their deeply pitted surfaces catching and scattering light in ways that can’t be planned or predicted. No two pieces are the same.

Each lamp sits on a polished copper cylinder base with a matching copper-toned cord. When lit, the shades glow a deep amber orange, with translucent sections illuminating like stained glass while the denser, hammered areas cast dramatic, irregular shadows. The warmth of the light feels almost geological, as if it’s being filtered through something that took centuries to form rather than a material coaxed into shape in a studio.

The project isn’t purely a lighting exercise, though. Zolnianska designed Echoes of Copper around a workshop model where participants can create their own version of the lamp at the former Medený Hamor site itself. The idea is to bring people back to a place of faded industrial significance and give them a hands-on connection to the craft traditions that once defined their community.

Medený Hamor, which translates roughly to “Copper Hammer,” was a copper-processing site in central Slovakia’s Banská Štiavnica region, an area with a centuries-old metallurgical history. Using that heritage as a creative prompt rather than a museum exhibit is itself a meaningful design decision. Of course, craft doesn’t have to end up behind glass to be preserved; sometimes it ends up glowing amber on someone’s bedside table.

Echoes of Copper was exhibited at BASE Milano during Milan Design Week 2026 as part of UNFOLD, a student showcase bringing together emerging designers from institutions across Europe. It’s the kind of project that deserves more attention than student exhibitions typically get. Zolnianska didn’t just make a lamp; she made an argument that industrial communities don’t have to lose their identity to time.

The post A Copper-Wax Lamp Revives a Slovak Forge and Glows Like Stained Glass first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Chair Looks Normal Until It Needs to Keep You Afloat in a Flood

Posted on by

Flooding has gone from a rare calamity to a recurring reality for millions of households. As climate patterns grow more unpredictable, the spaces people call home have become increasingly vulnerable to forces they were never designed to withstand. Most domestic objects offer no answer to this shift, and furniture has remained stubbornly indifferent to the idea that the room it sits in might one day be underwater.

That’s the gap a team of Domus Academy Milano students decided to close. Exhibited at BASE Milano as part of the 2026 Milan Design Week, AquaForma is a transformable furniture piece designed under the theme “Conflict: Human vs Nature.” Created by Valentina Algorta, Lorenzo Gennari, and Sabrina Lounis under faculty guidance, it explores how an everyday domestic object can quietly hold the capacity to save a life.

Designers: Valentina Algorta, Lorenzo Gennari, Sabrina Lounis (Domus Academy Milano)

The starting point is a familiar one: a chair. In its default configuration, AquaForma functions as low-profile floor seating with a cushioned backrest and seat upholstered in deep burgundy fabric. A white structural shell wraps around the cushioned elements in flowing, organic curves, giving the piece a sculptural quality that sits comfortably within contemporary furniture design. Nothing about it announces its other purpose.

That other purpose becomes clear when flooding hits. The piece uses modular panels, a ratchet buckle mechanism, and buoyant materials that allow it to be reconfigured into a flotation device. The modules interlock and can be reoriented, with individual components separating and reassembling into a completely different arrangement. What sits quietly in a living room can, in theory, keep someone afloat.

The ratchet strap across the midsection does more than hold the piece together; it’s the key mechanism that allows components to be tightened, secured, and adjusted depending on the configuration the piece needs to take. This kind of dual-purpose hardware thinking keeps the design grounded in practicality. There’s no single feature here that’s gratuitous, with everything pulling double duty between the domestic and the emergency.

What makes AquaForma particularly compelling is how invisible its emergency function is in everyday life. You wouldn’t sit on it and think about rising water, and that’s precisely the point. Resilience embedded in ordinary objects doesn’t announce itself until it needs to, and that restraint is what separates a clever concept from a genuinely useful one. The designers didn’t design for a crisis; they designed around it.

AquaForma was shown as part of the UNFOLD exhibition at BASE Milano during Milan Design Week 2026, a student showcase that puts emerging design ideas at the center of one of the world’s most design-saturated weeks. It’s the kind of project that’s easy to underestimate at first glance. A chair that becomes a flotation device sounds like a design school exercise until you remember how often people need exactly that.

The post This Chair Looks Normal Until It Needs to Keep You Afloat in a Flood first appeared on Yanko Design.

Elanco Made Dog-Shaped Furniture Because Your Sofa Has a Flea Problem

Posted on by

Pet ownership and interior design have always had an uneasy relationship. You pick out a sofa carefully, and within months, it’s covered in fur, scratch marks, or the lingering evidence of a bad flea season. Design spaces rarely acknowledge the animal that shares the room, and pet health brands rarely think to communicate through furniture. Most of the time, these two worlds simply don’t talk to each other.

Elanco, a global animal health company, had other ideas. For the 2026 Fuorisalone, it partnered with Milan-based architecture and design studio Parasite 2.0 to bring the Pet Collection to BASE Milano. The result is a limited-edition series of four pet-inspired furniture pieces that are equal parts campaign, design statement, and visual joke, all presented at one of Milan’s most forward-thinking creative venues.

Designers: Elanco, Parasite 2.0

The whole thing starts from a simple but uncomfortable truth. Fleas don’t just live on pets; they infest homes too, spreading through the furniture and floors that pets and people share. Elanco’s point is that your sofa and your dog aren’t as different as you think, at least not from a flea’s perspective. The collection makes that idea impossible to ignore.

Each piece is a pun on both a breed and a furniture type. The Basset Longue is a chaise longue upholstered in wavy, brown-striped faux fur, shaped after a Basset Hound, and mounted on chrome legs with a tail detail at one end. The Dalmatian is a wide sofa in black-spotted white plush with dark, rounded backrests that look like a dog curled up in place.

The Yorkchair is a chunky armchair draped entirely in long, golden faux fur with a small chrome detail on the back, very much like a Yorkshire Terrier wearing a collar. Then there’s the Gattond, which departs from the canine theme and becomes a feline-inspired coffee table, its polished metal top sitting on a rounded, fuzzy golden base with a tail sticking out from the side.

The Pet Collection is on view at BASE Milano as part of the 2026 Fuorisalone, and it’s the kind of exhibit that sticks with you long after you’ve left the room. Not because the furniture is particularly comfortable, mind you, but because the message is hard to unsee once you’ve seen it. Your sofa and your dog are, apparently, not so different after all.

The post Elanco Made Dog-Shaped Furniture Because Your Sofa Has a Flea Problem first appeared on Yanko Design.

What Streaming Took From Music, Samsung Design Just Gave Back

Posted on by

Music used to take up space in the most satisfying way. There was a record sleeve to pull from a shelf, a cassette to slot into a deck, a disc to slide into a tray. Each was a small, deliberate act that made listening feel like a choice rather than a background default. Streaming replaced all of that with convenience, and something tactile and visual quietly disappeared along the way.

Samsung Design seems to think that loss is worth addressing. At Milan Design Week 2026, it presented Visual Audio, a collection of music player concepts that reinterpret the forms of LPs, cassettes, and CD players through tailored displays. Rather than smart speakers with screens bolted on, they’re objects designed to make listening visible again, giving digital music a presence that largely disappeared with the vinyl era.

Designer: Samsung Audio

The appeal of analog formats was never really about fidelity. It was about having something to look at while the music played, a record spinning on a platter, tape reels turning inside their housing, a disc glowing in a transparent tray. Each gave listening a visual rhythm you could follow without thinking. Streaming quietly removed all of that, leaving the experience invisible in a way that’s only grown more obvious.

Visual Audio addresses this with objects that are clearly players but also clearly more. One recalls the boxy silhouette of a cassette deck, its screen animating spinning reels as the music plays. Another takes the form of a circular piece that simulates vinyl in motion, with a rotating label at the center. Each has a visual identity tied to the analog format it evokes, and that’s very much the point.

What these objects do differently from regular speakers or streaming devices is make playback legible. When something is playing, you see it happening. The interface isn’t a generic progress bar on an app; it’s a reel turning, a record label spinning, album art presented in a way that matches the physical form of the device. That makes sitting down to listen feel more like an occasion than a habit.

There’s also how these pieces actually live in a room. A speaker that looks like a cassette deck or a miniature turntable doesn’t need to be tucked in a corner; it contributes to the space around it, the way a record collection or a well-placed audio rack once did. Keep one on a desk, and it quietly communicates something about taste and how seriously you take the act of listening.

None of the Visual Audio concepts are headed for retail, and Samsung Design is upfront about that. They’re experiments, open questions about what music players could look like if they treated the emotional intelligence of analog formats as a design priority. The interesting thing is how specific and considered they are for objects not going anywhere near a store, which suggests this line of thinking goes beyond the exhibition itself.

The post What Streaming Took From Music, Samsung Design Just Gave Back first appeared on Yanko Design.

Samsung Design’s Milan 2026 AI Sphere Lifts Its Face Like It’s Alive

Posted on by

Smart home devices have come a long way from the plain white boxes we once hid behind sofas. Voice assistants sit openly on shelves now, and small robotic helpers are slowly making their way into living spaces. For all their usefulness, though, most still feel more like appliances than companions. They respond when spoken to, perform tasks, then go quiet, making the whole relationship feel transactional rather than warm.

Samsung Design seems to think there’s a better way. At Milan Design Week 2026, its Open Lab unveiled the AI Companion, a small spherical robot designed to feel less like a gadget and more like a genuine presence. The concept frames these companions as friends that “understand you and grow with you,” bringing delight and warmth to daily life rather than simply waiting for the next voice prompt.

Designer: Samsung Design

The AI Companion’s form is its first deliberate statement. It’s a near-perfect orb, compact and smooth, with a presence that feels more like a creature than a consumer device. There are no sharp edges, glowing rings, or intake vents, none of the usual signals of smart home hardware. What it has instead is a small circular screen that reads as expressive eyes, giving it a quiet, almost attentive quality.

That face is where the design becomes truly surprising. The upper section of the sphere lifts open, almost like a creature raising its head, to reveal a compact projector tucked inside. It’s a small mechanical gesture that carries outsized meaning. The transition from sealed orb to open, projecting device doesn’t feel like pressing a button; it feels like watching something wake up and decide to share a moment with you.

With that projector now exposed, the AI Companion can cast games, animations, and interactive content directly onto the surface in front of it. The experience shifts from a one-on-one interaction to something more communal, turning a tabletop into a small shared stage. It’s the kind of feature that makes the device feel genuinely social, designed for moments between people rather than a single user quietly issuing voice commands.

Part of what makes the AI Companion feel so considered is how personality has been worked into its physical design. It comes in distinct variants, each with its own visual character, from a minimal white orb to one with a yellow cap-like shell to another wrapped in teal and rust-orange. These aren’t cosmetic afterthoughts; they suggest that each companion is meant to reflect the personality of whoever it lives with.

Samsung Design also sees these companions as inherently social. They can interact with each other, creating the kinds of playful exchanges that make them feel more like characters sharing a space than devices sitting on a shelf. The AI Companion is explicitly a concept and isn’t headed for retail, but it lays out a compelling vision for home AI that’s designed to be felt, not just heard.

The post Samsung Design’s Milan 2026 AI Sphere Lifts Its Face Like It’s Alive first appeared on Yanko Design.

Issey Miyake’s Most Beautiful Material Was Always the Scrap

Posted on by

If you’ve ever watched the pleating process behind ISSEY MIYAKE’s iconic garments, you already know it’s one of the most satisfying things in fashion. The fabric goes in, it comes out textured and alive, and for decades, that has been the whole story. Satoshi Kondo, one of the design directors at MIYAKE DESIGN STUDIO, chose to flip the script. He looked not at the pleated garment coming off the machine, but at what was left behind: compressed rolls of wafer-thin paper, stacked and destined for the bin.

The result is The Paper Log: Shell and Core, a special exhibition running at the ISSEY MIYAKE Milan store this April, timed to coincide with Milan Design Week 2026. And it’s the kind of project that makes you want to rethink every process you’ve ever considered mundane.

Designer: Satoshi Kondo of MIYAKE DESIGN STUDIO

The paper in question is a production byproduct. These thin sheets are used to protect the fabric as it moves through the pleating machine, and when the garments are done, the sheets are rolled up, compressed, and typically moved off-site for recycling or disposal. What Kondo noticed during a visit to the manufacturer, though, was that these rolls look like logs. Not metaphorically, but structurally. Each compressed roll stands 80 cm tall and 40 cm wide, and when you look at the end of one, the layered paper creates a marbled, circular pattern that resembles the growth rings of a tree. Hence the name.

That visual parallel carries real weight. The Paper Log doesn’t just look like a tree trunk; it shares its logic. Growth rings mark time in a living thing, and the layers of the Paper Log carry the memory of every garment made at the house. It’s a surprisingly poetic idea from an industry that usually discards its footnotes.

For the exhibition, Kondo brought in Spanish architecture office Ensamble Studio to develop two distinct bodies of work from the same material. The first, Shell, takes the paper log apart and treats it like a sculptural material, creating crisp, delicate objects that feel frozen mid-process. They’re almost ghost-like, holding a shape the way paper holds a crease. The second body of work, Core, goes in the opposite direction. Here the paper is treated as structure, forming actual furniture prototypes including stools, chairs, and tables. Robust and handcrafted, these pieces sit in direct contrast to the fragility of Shell, and that tension is very much the point.

The installation is arranged throughout the store to play Shell and Core against each other, presenting opposing ideas side by side: ephemeral versus concrete, delicate versus robust. I find this curatorial framing genuinely effective. It’s rare to see a single waste material handled in ways that feel this philosophically distinct, and rarer still to see a fashion house direct that kind of rigorous design thinking toward something that would otherwise not exist at all.

What makes The Paper Log worth your attention beyond the visual spectacle is the quiet insistence that process deserves as much consideration as product. Issey Miyake has always been a house obsessed with how things are made. The pleating technology itself is a kind of philosophy, a belief that the mechanics of creation are as meaningful as the finished object. Applying that thinking to the waste materials of that same process feels less like an act of sustainability and more like an act of honesty.

Whether or not furniture made from fashion scraps becomes a commercial category (and it absolutely could), The Paper Log: Shell and Core operates primarily as a provocation. It asks what we overlook when we’re focused on the final product, and suggests that the answer might be the most interesting material in the room. The exhibition runs at the ISSEY MIYAKE Milan store on Via Bagutta 12, from April 21 to May 5, 2026.

The post Issey Miyake’s Most Beautiful Material Was Always the Scrap first appeared on Yanko Design.

Sabine Marcelis Built Coachella’s Best Spot Out of Thin Air

Posted on by

Every April, Coachella does that thing where it reminds you it’s not just a music festival. It’s a full-sensory exercise in spectacle, one that has always treated its art program with just as much ambition as its headliner lineup. This year, Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis is the one making that case loudest, with an installation called Maze that has, by most accounts, become one of the most talked-about spots on the entire festival grounds.

Maze is exactly what it sounds like, and also nothing like what you’d expect. Built from curved, inflated PVC walls that rise at varying heights, the structure winds across the Coachella grounds as a walkable labyrinth, one that feels less like an obstacle course and more like stepping into a fever dream of color and calm. The walls shift in a gradient from pale yellow at the outer edges to a deep, saturated red at the core, mimicking the warm, layered tones of a desert sunset. It’s the kind of color palette that looks deliberately, almost suspiciously perfect, and yet it doesn’t feel forced. It feels inevitable.

Designer: Sabine Marcelis

That’s what Marcelis does. The Rotterdam-based designer has built a body of work around the idea that light and material don’t just coexist. They perform together. Her practice leans into pure geometric forms and refined material investigations, always pushing manufacturing processes toward something surprising and sensory. At Coachella, that philosophy scales up beautifully. What could have been a gimmicky, oversized balloon art moment instead reads as something genuinely thoughtful: a structure designed to slow people down in a place that rarely stops moving.

And that’s the part that gets me. Coachella is famously relentless. Stages overlap, schedules are brutal, and the heat does not negotiate. Maze was built with that reality in mind. The inflated walls create shaded pockets, filtering both light and sound from the surrounding chaos. Seating runs along the outer edges, giving visitors actual places to stop and breathe. Clearings open up toward the stages, framing views of performances from inside the structure, so you never entirely lose the festival. You just get to experience it at a different speed.

Inspired by the natural contours of the Coachella Valley, the design has a landscape quality to it that reads as more than an aesthetic reference. The curved forms echo the rolling terrain of the desert, and the color gradient mirrors the sky at the specific hours when the California desert looks like it was art-directed by someone very talented. Marcelis didn’t try to compete with the landscape. She translated it. At night, the whole thing transforms. The PVC walls glow from within, turning the maze into an illuminated field of warm color that sits somewhere between architectural installation and light sculpture. If the daytime version is about refuge, the nighttime version is pure atmosphere. It hits differently against the dark, and I mean that in the best way.

I’ll be honest. I’ve watched the Coachella art program grow more ambitious over the years, and my reaction to any given installation tends to hover somewhere between “impressive” and “Instagram bait.” Maze clears that bar and then some. It works because it has an actual point of view. Marcelis built something that functions, that shelters, that engages the senses, and that happens to be visually stunning. That’s a harder balance to strike than it looks.

The installation was curated by Public Art Company, and it’s part of a broader 2026 art program that continues to push Coachella’s visual ambitions. But Maze stands out not because it’s the biggest or the flashiest. It stands out because it treats the people walking through it as the point, not the backdrop. That’s good design. And at a festival where you’re constantly being asked to witness things, it’s genuinely refreshing to walk into something that simply asks you to sit down and stay a while.

The post Sabine Marcelis Built Coachella’s Best Spot Out of Thin Air first appeared on Yanko Design.

Sabine Marcelis Built Coachella’s Best Spot Out of Thin Air

Posted on by

Every April, Coachella does that thing where it reminds you it’s not just a music festival. It’s a full-sensory exercise in spectacle, one that has always treated its art program with just as much ambition as its headliner lineup. This year, Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis is the one making that case loudest, with an installation called Maze that has, by most accounts, become one of the most talked-about spots on the entire festival grounds.

Maze is exactly what it sounds like, and also nothing like what you’d expect. Built from curved, inflated PVC walls that rise at varying heights, the structure winds across the Coachella grounds as a walkable labyrinth, one that feels less like an obstacle course and more like stepping into a fever dream of color and calm. The walls shift in a gradient from pale yellow at the outer edges to a deep, saturated red at the core, mimicking the warm, layered tones of a desert sunset. It’s the kind of color palette that looks deliberately, almost suspiciously perfect, and yet it doesn’t feel forced. It feels inevitable.

Designer: Sabine Marcelis

That’s what Marcelis does. The Rotterdam-based designer has built a body of work around the idea that light and material don’t just coexist. They perform together. Her practice leans into pure geometric forms and refined material investigations, always pushing manufacturing processes toward something surprising and sensory. At Coachella, that philosophy scales up beautifully. What could have been a gimmicky, oversized balloon art moment instead reads as something genuinely thoughtful: a structure designed to slow people down in a place that rarely stops moving.

And that’s the part that gets me. Coachella is famously relentless. Stages overlap, schedules are brutal, and the heat does not negotiate. Maze was built with that reality in mind. The inflated walls create shaded pockets, filtering both light and sound from the surrounding chaos. Seating runs along the outer edges, giving visitors actual places to stop and breathe. Clearings open up toward the stages, framing views of performances from inside the structure, so you never entirely lose the festival. You just get to experience it at a different speed.

Inspired by the natural contours of the Coachella Valley, the design has a landscape quality to it that reads as more than an aesthetic reference. The curved forms echo the rolling terrain of the desert, and the color gradient mirrors the sky at the specific hours when the California desert looks like it was art-directed by someone very talented. Marcelis didn’t try to compete with the landscape. She translated it. At night, the whole thing transforms. The PVC walls glow from within, turning the maze into an illuminated field of warm color that sits somewhere between architectural installation and light sculpture. If the daytime version is about refuge, the nighttime version is pure atmosphere. It hits differently against the dark, and I mean that in the best way.

I’ll be honest. I’ve watched the Coachella art program grow more ambitious over the years, and my reaction to any given installation tends to hover somewhere between “impressive” and “Instagram bait.” Maze clears that bar and then some. It works because it has an actual point of view. Marcelis built something that functions, that shelters, that engages the senses, and that happens to be visually stunning. That’s a harder balance to strike than it looks.

The installation was curated by Public Art Company, and it’s part of a broader 2026 art program that continues to push Coachella’s visual ambitions. But Maze stands out not because it’s the biggest or the flashiest. It stands out because it treats the people walking through it as the point, not the backdrop. That’s good design. And at a festival where you’re constantly being asked to witness things, it’s genuinely refreshing to walk into something that simply asks you to sit down and stay a while.

The post Sabine Marcelis Built Coachella’s Best Spot Out of Thin Air first appeared on Yanko Design.

Disney and NatGeo Built Billboards That Bees Can Actually Live In

Posted on by

Most billboards are built to be noticed and then forgotten. You see them, you process whatever they’re selling, and then they fade into the visual noise of the street. So when a campaign comes along that flips that formula entirely, it genuinely stops you in your tracks.

That’s exactly what’s happening in Manchester right now, where Disney and National Geographic, working with creative agency Meanwhile, have installed a series of billboards designed to do more than advertise. The structures, which the team calls “bloomboards,” are fitted with built-in cavities, textured surfaces, and planting elements that turn them into functioning habitats for bees. Not a two-week stunt. Not a PR photo op. Permanent installations, built from sustainably sourced cedar that had already been felled, placed across parks and public spaces throughout the city.

Designer: Meanwhile for Disney and National Geographic

The campaign ties to the launch of National Geographic’s Secrets of the Bees, a documentary series presented by explorer Bertie Gregory and executive produced by James Cameron. The series was filmed over several years using specialized cameras to capture bee behavior at a level of detail most of us have never seen. Entomologist Dr. Samuel Ramsey provided scientific input throughout. It’s streaming now on Disney+ and Hulu, and from a content standpoint alone, it sounds like essential viewing.

But the billboard work is where this becomes interesting as a piece of design thinking, not just marketing. Rather than placing a nature image on a billboard and calling it Earth Month, Meanwhile built the message into the medium. The physical structure becomes an argument for the cause. The billboard doesn’t just tell you bees matter; it gives them somewhere to live. Mini bee hotels have also been placed at several locations across Manchester, including Chorlton Water Park, Wythenshawe Park, Fletcher Moss Botanical Garden, and the Northern Quarter. Like the bloomboards, these aren’t decorative gestures. They’re functional, permanent additions to the urban landscape, and that distinction matters when the campaign is rooted in conservation.

Rachel Miles, creative director at Meanwhile, put it simply: “Our ambition is to encourage people to plant their own mix of shrubs and perennials to support bee populations and create a positive impact.” Michael Tsim, also a creative director at the agency, was just as direct: “Not just a two week campaign, but something they actually benefit from, permanently.”

That word, permanently, is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Environmental advertising has a long history of looking good while changing nothing. Companies run campaigns during Earth Month and then quietly move on. What makes this campaign feel different is that the outcomes are baked into the design itself. The bees don’t need to watch the documentary to benefit. The habitat exists regardless of whether anyone scans a QR code or downloads an app.

It also speaks to a broader shift in how thoughtful brands are approaching cause-driven work. The bar for audiences has risen sharply. People can spot the difference between a brand that has added a green ribbon to its logo and one that has committed real resources to a problem. Embedding a working habitat into an advertising structure is a tangible commitment, and one you can’t undo when April ends.

For anyone who follows design, this campaign is a reminder that the best work often finds its power in constraints. A billboard is a flat surface with a job to do. Meanwhile used that constraint not as a limitation but as a starting point, and the result is something genuinely unusual. Form serves function, function serves form, and both serve something beyond the campaign itself. Whether or not you plan to watch Secrets of the Bees (though I’d argue you should), the billboard project stands on its own as a piece of design worth paying attention to. It’s an example of what happens when a brief asks for more than attention and a creative team decides to take that seriously.

The post Disney and NatGeo Built Billboards That Bees Can Actually Live In first appeared on Yanko Design.

Janny Baek’s Ceramics Look Like They’re Still Evolving

Posted on by

Most ceramic art asks you to admire it from a distance. Janny Baek’s work makes you want to lean in closer and check if it’s breathing. Her upcoming solo exhibition, Life Forms, opens at Joy Machine gallery in Chicago on March 20, running through May 9, 2026, and from everything I’ve seen of it, it might be one of the more visually arresting shows to land this spring. The pieces gather across the gallery space like inhabitants of an ecosystem you’ve never visited but somehow recognize. Some forms open outward like blossoms. Others stretch upward with limbs that suggest wings, or stems, or shells. None of them fully commit to being any one thing, and that’s exactly the point.

What makes Baek’s ceramics so compelling is the feeling that the firing process didn’t quite finish the job. The sculptures look caught mid-transformation, as though another hour in the kiln might have resolved them into something more familiar. Instead, they hold their ambiguity like a posture. That deliberate incompleteness is one of the most interesting creative choices an artist can make, and Baek has built an entire body of work around it.

Designer: Janny Baek

Her path to ceramics is almost as unusual as the work itself. Born in Seoul and raised in Queens, she studied ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design before taking a turn into animation and toy design as a sculptor. Then she earned a graduate degree in architecture from Harvard, co-founded an architecture practice in Manhattan, and spent years designing high-end residential spaces. When the pandemic hit, she returned to clay, setting up a studio in the back of her Flatiron District architecture office. The ceramics world should be grateful for the timing.

That architectural background isn’t incidental. You can see it in the structural logic of the pieces, which begin with coiled bases and build upward through successive additions of clay, each element branching from the last. The result is less like sculpting and more like construction, or perhaps like watching something grow. Her larger work, Plant Life (2025), stoneware with colored sections rising from white shoots, reads almost like a site plan for a garden on a planet where the plants decided to do their own thing.

The technique she relies on is nerikomi, a traditional Japanese method that involves stacking clay of different colors and slicing through it to reveal the pattern within. But Baek’s application of it feels more contemporary than the technique’s origins might suggest. Color, in her hands, is structural rather than decorative. It moves through the clay like a current, not like paint on a surface. She has described color gradients as “the continuous nature of change,” and a multitude of colors as “potential, abundance, and vitality.” That framing matters. It tells you the work isn’t just pretty, it’s philosophic.

The piece titles reinforce this. Micro-organisms, Glow Sticks, and Outer Galaxies. Prismatic Walking Cloud. 5 Eyes (Dream State Series). Cloudbloom. They read like entries in a field guide to a world that hasn’t been discovered yet, which is probably the most accurate way to describe what Baek is building. Her ceramics operate on what one description of the work calls “dream logic, one that accepts incongruity and dissonance as necessary to play and experimentation.” That’s a generous creative framework, and it shows. The work never feels confused or unresolved. It feels deliberate in its strangeness.

What I find most refreshing about Life Forms is that it doesn’t ask you to bring any specific context to it. You don’t need to know the theory behind nerikomi or have an opinion about contemporary ceramics to stand in front of one of these pieces and feel something. They work on a more basic level, the level of looking at something unfamiliar and recognizing it anyway. Like you’ve seen its kind before, somewhere between a dream and a nature documentary.

The post Janny Baek’s Ceramics Look Like They’re Still Evolving first appeared on Yanko Design.