GANG Studio’s Flip Chair Was Born From a Sheet of Korean Craft Paper

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You know that double-sided colored paper, one side red, one side white, the kind you’d fold into cranes and fortune tellers as a kid? Seoul-based GANG Studio turned that memory into a chair, and somehow it works completely.

The Flip Chair, a 2026 artisanal project by designer Kikang Kim, takes its core concept directly from 색종이, the double-sided colored paper that’s a staple of Korean childhood craft. The idea is simple: a sheet that reveals a completely different color depending on which way you look at it. Applied to furniture, this translates into metal sheets where the front face and the back face carry contrasting hues, so the chair literally changes character depending on the angle you’re viewing it from. The name isn’t just clever. It’s the whole point.

Designer: GANG Studio

What makes this genuinely interesting, and not just Instagram-interesting, is how deliberate the idea is. Good furniture design usually asks you to look at it from one preferred angle, the hero shot that ended up on the mood board. The Flip Chair refuses to cooperate with that logic. It doesn’t have a wrong side or a right side. You get two chairs for the price of one visual experience, depending on where you’re standing in the room. For anyone who’s ever turned a piece around and liked the back better, that feels quietly radical.

Kikang Kim leads GANG Studio out of Seoul with the kind of quietly confident focus that makes you pay attention. The studio’s philosophy centers on weaving stories into everyday objects, from furniture and decorative items to consumer electronics. That mission statement could easily sound generic, but the Flip Chair is proof it means something in practice. The story isn’t buried in a press release. It’s right there, written into the object’s surface.

Korean design has been having a real moment internationally, and it’s not hard to see why when studios like GANG are pushing this kind of thinking. The country’s design culture has always carried a sophisticated relationship with materiality and craft, from traditional lacquerwork to contemporary lighting, and what’s emerging right now feels less like trend-chasing and more like a design community that has genuinely found its own voice. The Flip Chair sits comfortably inside that story without having to announce it.

The artisanal classification matters here too. This isn’t a piece designed for mass production, and you can feel that intention in the concept itself. A factory-scaled version of this chair would probably flatten its meaning, turn it into a gimmick, a color-block moment for a hotel lobby. Made by hand, the dual-color metal sheet carries weight, both literally and metaphorically. The idea of someone deliberately choosing which side faces outward begins to feel like a quiet conversation between maker and owner.

I’ll be honest: the childhood reference hits. Design that reaches into universal memory without tipping into sentimentality is genuinely difficult to pull off. The best of it makes you feel like the designer found something you’d forgotten you knew. The Flip Chair does exactly that. You don’t need to have grown up folding 색종이 to immediately understand what it means to have something that looks completely different depending on how you hold it. That’s a deeply human experience, and a clever one to build a chair around.

It also raises a question that more furniture designers should probably be asking: what happens to an object’s meaning when its appearance shifts with perspective? Most furniture is designed to be consistent, predictable, fully resolved. The Flip Chair introduces a small, deliberate amount of ambiguity into a category that rarely invites it. And that’s the kind of move that tends to stay with you long after you’ve scrolled past the renders.

GANG Studio isn’t trying to reinvent the chair. It’s doing something harder: giving a familiar form a genuine idea to carry. The Flip Chair is the kind of piece you’d want in a corner of a room not just because it looks good, but because it keeps making you look again.

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GoPro Just Crammed 6 Cameras Into One 50MP Sensor, And It Starts At $499

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Framework laptops let you swap the motherboard. Fairphone lets you replace the battery with a coin. Teenage Engineering builds entire product ecosystems around interoperability. Somewhere between the maker-movement idealism of the mid-2010s and the sustainability push of the pandemic years, modularity graduated from hobbyist curiosity to a legitimate consumer electronics strategy. Now GoPro has quietly joined that movement, and almost nobody has noticed because the packaging looks like a standard product launch.

The MISSION 1 lineup contains six distinct configurations built around a single hardware core: a 50MP 1-inch sensor and GP3 processor, wrapped in a rugged compact body waterproof to 20 meters. There’s the base MISSION 1, the MISSION 1 PRO, the PRO Grip Edition, the PRO ILS with a Micro Four Thirds mount, the PRO Creator Edition, and the PRO Ultimate Creator Edition. Preorders opened May 21, 2026, with the ILS and Creator variants shipping in Q3. Pricing wasn’t announced at launch, which is its own kind of tell. What GoPro has actually built here is a hardware platform wearing the clothes of a product line.

Designer: GoPro

The base MISSION 1 caps at 4K120 Open Gate and 8K30 in 16:9, positioned for creators who want the new sensor without paying flagship money. The MISSION 1 PRO unlocks 8K60, 4K240, and 1080p960 slow motion, all recorded in 10-bit with the GP Log2 profile for grading headroom. The PRO Grip Edition bundles a dedicated handle for run-and-gun work. The Creator and Ultimate Creator Editions add production accessories aimed at YouTubers who want a boxed kit rather than a shopping list. Every variant shares the same 14-stop dynamic range, the same 32-bit float audio, and the same waterproofing without an external housing. Firmware caps and bundled accessories, in other words, do all the heavy lifting across five of the six SKUs.

Micro Four Thirds compatibility on the PRO ILS is where the platform argument stops being subtle. The mount opens the door to hundreds of existing lenses from Panasonic, OM System, Sigma, Voigtländer, and Laowa, meaning GoPro inherits nearly two decades of glass engineering without designing a single optical element themselves. HyperSmooth stabilization keeps working with any rectilinear prime, which is genuinely wild given how stabilization algorithms usually assume a fixed lens with known distortion characteristics. The body stays waterproof despite the mechanical mount, which required custom sealing work that GoPro has been notably quiet about. This is Framework’s motherboard-swap philosophy transplanted into a category where interchangeable parts were reserved for cameras that cost five times more. MFT also carries mature adapters for Canon EF, Nikon F, and PL cinema glass, quietly extending the effective lens library into the thousands.

Six SKUs from a single sensor line is also a hedge, and a smart one. If the ILS flops with videographers because Blackmagic and Panasonic own that mindshare, the base MISSION 1 still sells to adventure creators on brand recognition alone. If 8K60 pricing scares off the semi-pro tier, the 4K120 base model catches the mid-market. The recent industry chatter that GoPro may be for sale following the MISSION 1 pivot reads very differently through this lens. Whether Nicholas Woodman is building for the next decade or quietly pitching to potential acquirers like DJI or Sony, a modular platform tells a far more compelling story than a single hero product ever could. The action camera market that GoPro invented has been eating itself for years, and platforms tend to survive longer than products in categories that are actively contracting.

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The Medical Fridge That Borrowed a 3,000-Year-Old Idea

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Korean industrial designer Yongwon Kim just posted a concept on Behance that made me stop my scroll completely. It’s called EVAPOT, and it’s a medical fridge. But the way it works is what makes it genuinely remarkable.

EVAPOT is an evaporative medical fridge, meaning it uses the natural physics of water evaporation to maintain cool temperatures. No compressor hum. No refrigerant gases. No power grid dependency. Just water, air, and a design principle that humans have been quietly exploiting for thousands of years.

Designer: Yongwon Kim

The technique EVAPOT draws from is ancient. The pot-in-pot cooler, also known as a zeer pot, dates back to civilizations in ancient Egypt and Persia who understood that when water evaporates, it pulls heat away from whatever it surrounds. The very basic version: put a smaller clay pot inside a larger one, fill the gap with wet sand, and the inner pot stays significantly cooler than the ambient air. No electricity. No moving parts. In the 1990s, Nigerian teacher Mohammed Bah Abba revived and scaled the concept, earning him a Rolex Award for Enterprise and changing food storage for thousands of rural families. What Kim has done with EVAPOT is take that foundational logic and redirect it toward one of the most pressing, underserved areas in global healthcare: medical cold storage.

Cold chain failure is a problem that doesn’t get nearly enough attention in design conversations. Vaccines, insulin, blood products, certain diagnostic samples: all of them require refrigeration at specific temperatures to remain viable. And when the power goes out, or when clinics operate in areas where the power never reliably came on to begin with, those materials are compromised. The pharmaceutical industry is estimated to lose billions of dollars annually due to temperature-related failures. The human cost of that, measured in spoiled vaccines and interrupted treatments, is harder to quantify but far more significant.

That’s the space EVAPOT is designed to occupy. A cooling unit that doesn’t depend on electricity to stay functional. Visually, the renders on Kim’s Behance are striking. The form carries a clean, sculptural quality that doesn’t look like what you’d normally associate with medical equipment. Most clinical refrigerators look like they belong in a break room. EVAPOT looks like it belongs at a design fair, which is probably what will get it in front of the right eyes.

Kim’s concept is a smart synthesis of two things the design world talks about constantly but rarely manages to connect: ancient ingenuity and contemporary need. The materials suggested, the form factor, the application to medical storage rather than food, these are all choices that feel deliberate and considered. It signals that the designer wasn’t just playing with an interesting visual, but was genuinely thinking about where this gap exists in the world and who it serves.

I’ll be honest: the concept is exciting, and it also deserves serious critique alongside the applause. Evaporative cooling works best in dry climates. Humidity is its natural enemy, and many of the regions most in need of off-grid medical cold storage are tropical or coastal, where ambient moisture in the air significantly reduces the efficiency of evaporative systems. That’s a real engineering challenge that any production version of EVAPOT would need to solve if it’s going to be more than a beautiful idea. But beautiful ideas have started more revolutions than fully engineered ones, and this is still a concept stage.

What Kim has done is put a compelling, well-rendered proposal into public conversation, and that has value. Sometimes the job of a designer at the concept phase is not to answer every question but to ask a better one. The question EVAPOT poses, whether ancient, low-tech cooling logic can be reimagined for modern medical use, is absolutely the right one. It’s the kind of thinking that comes from looking sideways at a problem instead of straight at it. And maybe that’s where the most interesting design is always living. Not in the obvious upgrade, but in the unexpected detour through history.

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Who is Apple’s New Chief Hardware Officer: Meet Johny Srouji, The Man Shaping Apple’s Roadmap

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Every great Apple product from the last thirty years came out of a partnership. Steve Jobs had Jony Ive, a designer with more operational power than anyone at Apple except Jobs himself. Tim Cook inherited that dynamic in 2011, and over the next fifteen years the industrial design studio slowly lost its seat at the executive table, with finance and operations gaining a larger say over product direction. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has described the current studio as a shell of what it used to be, briefed by other teams rather than briefing them. That is the Apple John Ternus takes over on September 1, 2026, and his choice of number two says everything about where the next decade is headed.

Johny Srouji became Apple’s Chief Hardware Officer on April 20, 2026, a title that did not exist a day earlier. The role folds Apple’s hardware engineering group, previously run by Ternus himself, into the hardware technologies organization Srouji has led since 2015. He now controls silicon, batteries, cameras, sensors, displays, storage controllers, cellular modems, product design engineering, and every reliability lab in Cupertino. Ternus is his only boss, which effectively makes Srouji operational number two at a four trillion dollar company. The last time one Apple executive held this much hardware authority, Steve Jobs was still alive and Bob Mansfield was running the show.

Srouji was born in 1964 in Haifa, the third of four children in a middle-class Arab Christian family, his father a carpenter who built casting molds by trade. He studied computer science at Technion, graduating summa cum laude on his bachelor’s and magna cum laude on his master’s. Before Apple came calling, he had already done processor design at Intel Austin and managed IBM’s POWER7 CPU. Bob Mansfield recruited him in 2008 to build a chip Apple did not yet know how to design, which became the A4 that launched inside the first iPad and iPhone 4. Colleagues describe him as no-nonsense, allergic to technical vagueness, and unwilling to accept anything less than the hard truth about what silicon can and cannot do.

Every A-series and M-series chip you have ever used came out of Srouji’s org. His team pulled off the 64-bit A7 in 2013 that caught Qualcomm completely flat-footed, then engineered the M1 transition in 2020 that made Intel Macs obsolete overnight. Apple’s whole vertical integration story, the one that lets a MacBook Air outperform Windows laptops twice its price on battery life, is essentially his life’s work. His team also introduced the Neural Engine in 2017 with the A11 Bionic, quietly laying the groundwork for on-device AI half a decade before the industry decided AI was a talking point. The man who liberated Apple from Intel’s silicon almost got poached by Intel to be their CEO in 2019.

Ive read Dieter Rams and treated industrial design as the ordering principle of a product, sketching an object first and asking engineering to solve for it. Srouji operates from the opposite pole, treating silicon as the ordering principle and letting form factor, material, and thermal envelope adapt to what the chip can do at what power draw. The $599 MacBook Neo Apple launched in March 2026 is the perfect case study, because it only exists as a product because the A18 Pro from last year’s iPhone 16 Pro became efficient enough to run macOS without cooking itself or eating the battery. Ternus led the keynote and got the credit, but Srouji built the runway. That reframing of where design begins, at the wafer rather than the render, is the first coherent thesis about form and function anyone has articulated at Apple since Ive walked out in 2019.

Ternus and Srouji together cover the full stack from atom to product enclosure, which is the tightest hardware leadership Apple has run since Jobs, Ive, and Jon Rubinstein were setting product direction from the same conference room. Srouji has already started restructuring aggressively, splitting hardware into five groups and moving product design authority from veteran VP Kate Bergeron to Shelly Goldberg on Mac and Dave Pakula on Watch, iPad, and AirPods. He has also stood up a new Ecosystems Platforms and Partnerships team led by Matt Costello and Kevin Lynch, the latter of whom runs Apple’s still-secret robotics group. In his internal memo to staff, Srouji wrote that he intends to deepen integration between the silicon teams and the product-creating teams. Translation: the chip designers will now sit closer to the people deciding what the next iPhone actually looks like.

Everyone keeps asking whether Ternus and Srouji will turn Apple into a Xiaomi or Samsung style product factory, launching sub-brands and price tiers across every possible category. I don’t think that is where this goes. Xiaomi wins on volume and value engineering, Samsung wins on being first to try every new form factor, and Apple under Srouji looks positioned to do something closer to the Jobs-era iPod strategy: one core capability, several related form factors, each tuned to a different lifestyle. AI camera glasses in 2027, camera-equipped AirPods, a rumored wearable pendant, a HomePad with a swiveling display, and a foldable iPhone all sit on the same roadmap, and they are fundamentally the same argument as iPod versus Nano versus Shuffle was in 2005. Discipline stays intact, but the surface area for hardware expands into whatever new form the current silicon can actually support without turning your pocket into a hand warmer.

Srouji’s promotion is Apple’s bet that AI-era consumer devices will be won by whoever can co-design chip, sensor, battery, and enclosure as a single integrated object. That is a bet Apple can uniquely make because it already owns the whole stack, and one that Meta, Google, and even OpenAI (currently building its own hardware future with Ive, Evans Hankey, and Tang Tan poached straight out of Cupertino) still cannot fully replicate. The risk sits on the software side, where Apple’s own AI models trail rivals and Siri keeps getting delayed for reasons nobody at Apple wants to explain in public. Srouji cannot fix that himself. What he can do is make sure that whenever Apple finally ships a competent generative model, the hardware waiting to receive it has been designed around what the model actually needs, rather than retrofitted around it after launch.

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A Craftsman Just Turned Dead Car Engines Into One-of-a-Kind Guitars

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I’ve been thinking about this one for days. A Slovenian craftsman named Vlado Plateis is turning discarded car engine heads into fully playable electric guitars, and every time I look at the photos, I still can’t decide if I’m staring at a musical instrument or a sculpture. Maybe that’s exactly the point.

The design logic here is deceptively simple: take the engine head as the body of the guitar, preserve its raw industrial form, and build around it rather than in spite of it. Nothing is polished away, sanded smooth, or disguised. The cast metal arrives with its own surface history of machined edges, bolt holes, and combustion chamber cavities, and all of it stays. The visible scars and geometry of the original part become the visual language of the finished instrument. That restraint is a design decision, and it’s a brave one. Most makers would be tempted to refine. Plateis resists that impulse entirely.

Designer: Vlado Plateis

What makes the objects so visually arresting is the tension between their two identities. The pickups, tuning pegs, and strings are all standard guitar hardware, clean and purposeful. Set against the rough, irregular topography of the engine casting, they create a contrast that reads as almost confrontational. One material is mass-produced and precise. The other is heavy, asymmetrical, and marked by mechanical life. Together, they don’t clash so much as they hold a conversation, and that conversation is what you keep looking at.

Each engine head also brings an entirely different geometry to the design, which means every guitar has a silhouette that could never be repeated. A guitar built from a Toyota Corolla head looks nothing like one built from a Mitsubishi Colt. The donor car determines the form. The bolt pattern, the fin arrangement, the overall mass and proportion are all inherited rather than designed, which paradoxically makes the final object feel more authored, not less. Plateis isn’t imposing a shape. He’s discovering one that was already there.

The weight is part of the design too, and I think it matters more than people initially consider. These are dense, substantial objects. You don’t pick one up and forget what it’s made from. That physicality communicates something about permanence that most contemporary design actively avoids. We’re so conditioned to lightweight, minimal, and frictionless that an object with genuine heft feels almost transgressive. It asks you to be present with it.

I also want to talk about what Plateis doesn’t do, because restraint is underrated in design. He doesn’t paint the metal. He doesn’t add decorative elements that aren’t structurally necessary. He doesn’t try to make the engine head look like something it isn’t. The honesty of the material is the aesthetic. That’s a philosophy rooted in the same tradition as Shaker furniture and Braun electronics, the idea that a thing should look exactly like what it is and nothing more. Applied to a guitar made from automotive scrap, it produces something genuinely unexpected.

Upcycling in design is popular right now, often to the point of feeling performative. Brands slap the word “reclaimed” on something and call it sustainable, but the object itself is forgettable. Plateis sidesteps all of that because the material isn’t incidental to the design. It is the design. Because every engine head has a different geometry, every guitar is structurally and visually unique. You cannot order the same one twice. The scarcity isn’t manufactured. It’s inherent to the process.

As someone who pays close attention to design, I think Plateis Guitars represents something genuinely interesting happening at the intersection of material culture, craft, and form-making. It’s a reminder that the most compelling design doesn’t always come from the biggest studios or the most advanced technology. Sometimes it comes from someone in Slovenia, a scrapped engine head, and a very considered eye for what already exists inside a piece of discarded metal.

Whether or not you play guitar, whether or not you care about cars, these objects deserve your attention. They are proof that constraints can be generative, and that found form, treated with patience and respect, can produce something completely new.

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The Samsung Galaxy S27 Ultra Hardware Change No One Expected

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The Samsung Galaxy S27 Ultra Hardware Change No One Expected Demonstration of the privacy display technology on a Galaxy S27

The Samsung Galaxy S27 Ultra is poised to elevate the flagship smartphone experience, introducing noteworthy advancements in camera technology, display innovation, and privacy features. As leaks and rumors circulate, it becomes clear that Samsung aims to cater to a wide audience, ranging from photography enthusiasts to privacy-conscious users, while maintaining its reputation for innovative design […]

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Insta360 Luna Ultra Adds Leica Optics but Faces Overheating Issues

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Insta360 Luna Ultra Adds Leica Optics but Faces Overheating Issues User holding the Insta360 Luna Ultra wireless remote screen.

The Insta360 Luna Ultra introduces features like a detachable wireless display and Leica optics, aiming to enhance image quality and usability for creators. According to Tech Court, while these features offer notable advantages, the device’s first-generation design presents challenges such as overheating during extended use and occasional connectivity problems with the wireless display. These issues […]

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