Tag Archives: Events

BYREDO’s Steel Spheres Reveal Hidden Landscapes Inspired by Scent

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A field of tiny steel spheres is an unusual way to introduce a perfume. It also addresses a familiar problem with fragrance displays: the bottle is visible, but the thing you’re supposed to care about isn’t. Matter / Memory, an interactive installation by Leonardo Garza for BYREDO, gives that invisible subject a physical form you can explore with your hands.

Commissioned for BYREDO’s introduction to Mexico, the installation appeared at the brand’s October 7 launch event in Mexico City, with Artsynonym handling the curation. It’s a spatial artwork, not a new fragrance or an object headed for your bathroom shelf. I like that distinction. It gives the project room to interpret perfume rather than explain why you should buy another bottle.

Designer: Leonardo Garza for BYREDO

The construction consists of five curved sections, each holding a different material composition beneath a transparent surface. Thousands of stainless steel spheres partially obscure those compositions. Visitors can push the spheres around, opening patches through which the contents become visible. Their movement also produces subtle metallic sounds. The interaction is refreshingly legible: move your hand, change the view, hear the result. You don’t need a tutorial to understand the invitation.

Each section corresponds to a BYREDO fragrance. Gypsy Water becomes charcoal and ash; Rose of No Man’s Land is interpreted through fractured glass. Mojave Ghost takes the form of mineral dust, while Bal d’Afrique becomes red ochre earth. Blanche gets folded white textile. These are Garza’s material interpretations, not a display of perfume ingredients, and that difference matters. You’re being offered associations to consider, with no requirement to agree with them.

The charcoal and broken glass are especially compelling choices to me. Ash suggests an aftermath, while fractured glass carries a vulnerability that a pristine perfume bottle would struggle to communicate. Neither is an obvious shortcut to luxury. That makes the selection more interesting than a literal arrangement of flowers or fruit. It leaves enough ambiguity for a visitor to bring a different reading, which feels appropriate for something as personal as fragrance.

In the photographs, the curved sections form an open, nearly circular arrangement on slender supports. Light beneath the transparent tops makes the steel spheres appear dark in some areas and sharply reflective in others. Pushed into clusters, they create irregular borders around the exposed compositions. I’m drawn to that contrast between the controlled geometry of the structure and the loose, changeable patterns across its surface. It gives a carefully staged installation some welcome disorder.

The transparent covering is an important detail, too. The fractured glass sits beneath the interaction surface; visitors move the spheres above it rather than handle the shards. That separation creates a useful tension. You can alter what you see without rearranging the material composition itself. To my eye, the most effective design decision is this limited permission: enough freedom to participate, enough structure to preserve the scene Garza has composed.

A low layer of fog supplies the theatrical atmosphere. It’s the element I’m least convinced the piece needs. The illuminated curves and movable steel already offer a strong visual language, and mist risks making the installation feel like a luxury campaign set. Still, the hand-operated interaction gives it something a photograph alone can’t fully deliver. The visitor has an actual role beyond standing in a flattering pool of light.

Of course, none of this tells you how a fragrance will smell on your skin. I wouldn’t expect it to. Its value, for me, is in giving the encounter a little duration: looking, moving, uncovering, making an association. The steel spheres put a small, satisfying task between the visitor and the display. For a project about memory, that feels like a sensible place to start, with something you did rather than another image you saw.

The post BYREDO’s Steel Spheres Reveal Hidden Landscapes Inspired by Scent first appeared on Yanko Design.

DRIFT’s Glass Sculpture Traces Wind Without Moving

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Wind usually needs an accomplice to become visible: a bending tree, a billowing curtain, a plastic bag having a much more cinematic afternoon than it deserves. Air itself gives us very little to look at. Aeolus, a new installation by Amsterdam-based studio DRIFT, takes on that perceptual problem with hundreds of suspended glass rods and light. It gives an invisible force a form you can actually follow.

The studio’s founders, Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, have made Aeolus an interactive artwork rather than a conventional light fixture. Presented with Carpenters at London’s Ladbroke Hall from October 13 through 25, 2026, the installation takes its name from the Greek god of the winds. Its shape, though, comes from a specific earthly source: the architecture of the room containing it.

Designer: DRIFT

DRIFT begins with a digital reading of the surrounding architecture, then translates that space into a virtual environment where air can flow. The studio selects one moment from that simulated movement and gives it physical form in glass. That distinction matters. Aeolus isn’t showing a live reading of whatever breeze happens to be passing through the gallery. Its structure holds a chosen instant, while the lighting introduces a separate layer of change.

I like that the room has a say in the result. A sculpture built from its setting feels more considered than an impressive object dropped into an available corner. DRIFT says each installation is generated by its host architecture, so the curves carry information about a particular place. The building becomes part of the design process, even if visitors never see the digital model behind it.

In Benjamin Baccarani’s photographs, the rods gather into a long, sweeping formation, dipping at one end and stretching outward at the other. Fine suspension lines lead up to a broad overhead panel. The material list is more technical than the airy appearance suggests: borosilicate glass rods, stainless steel nodes, custom LEDs, and microcoax cables. I appreciate that contrast. Making an object look almost weightless still requires hardware, connections, and a deliberate relationship with gravity.

The glass itself stays still. According to Carpenters, small lights inside the rods change their rhythm and intensity in response to visitors moving through the space. Waves of illumination create the impression of motion without the sculpture physically shifting. That’s the cleverest choice here. The designers don’t need to swing a roomful of glass around to suggest wind; they let your eyes follow light across a fixed structure, doing much of the perceptual work.

The interaction also gives visitors a meaningful role without turning them into operators. Walking changes the work’s lighting, a relationship that seems appropriately direct for an installation about air and movement. I’m drawn to technology that makes its presence felt through an understandable response. Here, the interesting question is how your movement alters what you see, rather than how many technical features the system contains.

DRIFT frames Aeolus as an invitation to reconsider our relationship with nature. I’d treat that as a starting point for looking, not a transformation any artwork can promise. The more convincing achievement is smaller and more specific: making airflow legible through material and light. You don’t need to leave with a new environmental philosophy to appreciate the way a simulated path has become a collection of precise, luminous curves.

For me, the appeal sits in that modest shift in attention. The room stops being an empty container for an artwork and starts to look like a place shaped by movement. Aeolus makes that movement imaginable while keeping the glass suspended in a single instant. A visitor supplies motion, the lights answer, and the fixed structure takes on another rhythm. The glass gives you time to study a shape that moving air would never hold still for inspection.

The post DRIFT’s Glass Sculpture Traces Wind Without Moving first appeared on Yanko Design.

LA’s 60-Foot Light Sculpture Actually Makes Music Visible

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An orchestra can fill a room with sound, yet the experience of that sound is mostly invisible. For someone curious about live classical music, a screen might seem like the obvious way to make a performance feel more immediate. But projected images can also pull attention away from the musicians. Grimanesa Amorós’s Radiance offers a more interesting answer: let the room itself help tell the story.

Commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the light sculpture was created for performances of Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus: The Poem of Fire at Walt Disney Concert Hall. It hung above the orchestra while a programmed sequence of colors unfolded with the music. Amorós also coordinated the hall’s existing lights with the sculpture, so the effect reached beyond the stage and into the audience’s surroundings.

Designer: Grimanesa Amorós

At 60 feet long and 35 feet wide, Radiance has the scale to command a room. It is made with reflective material and rope-like LED tubing that changes color. Those practical details matter because this is not a video pretending to be a physical object. The light occupies real space above real musicians, and its shifting glow can change how the hall feels without replacing the performance at its center.

The sequence was planned second by second around the orchestra, with six major synchronized moments. I like that distinction. A lighting effect that reacts to every beat could easily become a demonstration of clever technology. Here, the programming is closer to staging: deliberate enough to give a musical passage a visual shape, but not so busy that it asks the audience to watch for the next trick.

Fire is the work’s starting point, which makes sense beside a piece called Prometheus. Amorós draws on both the Greek figure who gave fire to humanity and Viracocha, an Incan creator deity. That could have led to a very literal display of flames. Instead, Radiance treats fire as an idea that can move through color, intensity and space. Its subject is transformation, not an illustration of a myth.

That choice gives the installation room to breathe. A red glow above the orchestra can feel urgent; amber spreading across the sculpture, stage and seating can feel warmer and more expansive. Neither color needs to tell viewers precisely what the music means. The visual experience can accompany the sound while leaving people free to make their own connections, which is more generous than spelling out every emotion for them.

Walt Disney Concert Hall is hardly a blank canvas. Its interior already gives a performance a strong visual setting. Rather than treating that architecture as a backdrop, Amorós made the house lighting part of the same sequence as the sculpture. That feels like the smartest design move here. If the room changes with the music, the audience is included in the experience instead of simply looking up at an object.

It is tempting to describe a project like this as a concert crossed with a light show, but that sells both halves short. The appeal is not that classical music has been dressed up to compete with a pop spectacle. It is that visual design can make an existing performance feel more accessible without demanding a new set of habits from the listener. You can follow the colors closely or let them register at the edges of your attention.

There is a risk with any large-scale installation that the photographs become the main event. Radiance certainly photographs well, especially when its strands glow against the hall’s interior. But its real purpose depended on timing, sound and the shared experience of sitting in the room. Presented across three performances, it was made for a particular encounter rather than an endlessly repeatable display.

That is why Radiance stays with me as a design idea. It does not try to explain Scriabin’s music or promise that light can replace listening. It addresses a smaller, more human problem: how to help an audience feel connected to something they cannot see. By giving the music a presence overhead and around the seats, Amorós made the concert hall feel less like a container for a performance and more like part of it.

The post LA’s 60-Foot Light Sculpture Actually Makes Music Visible first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Photographer Spent Weeks in a Suzhou Silk Studio. Here’s What He Found

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When Jing Huang walked into a kesi weaving studio in Suzhou, China, he made a decision that runs counter to almost everything happening in photography right now. He put away the instinct to explain and just started watching. For most photographers working today, that would feel like leaving something on the table. In a studio where a finished piece can take months to complete, it turned out to be the only approach that made sense.

Huang is a photographer with serious credentials. He won the Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award in 2011 for a series called Pure of Sight, and his visual style has always leaned toward stillness, restraint, and negative space rather than the kind of maximalist documentation that tends to flatten its subject. So when Lexar and Leica brought him to Suzhou to photograph kesi artist Hao Naiqiang, known professionally as Jingwei, the choice made sense on paper. What’s harder to predict is what happens when a photographer with that kind of discipline actually sits with a craft as slow and precise as kesi.

Artist: Hao Naiqiang (Jingwei) for Lexar and Leica

Photographer: Jing Huang

Kesi is a Chinese silk weaving technique that’s been around for centuries, and it operates on a logic completely alien to the way most things get made today. The artisan builds a piece thread by thread against a fixed warp, making constant decisions about color, contour, and rhythm with no automation, no shortcuts, and no undo button. There’s an old Chinese saying that captures it better than any technical description: an inch of kesi is worth an inch of gold. Jingwei has been practicing it for more than a decade and is formally recognized as a representative inheritor of the Suzhou tradition. Every finished piece represents a depth of time investment that genuinely earns that comparison.

What Huang found in that studio wasn’t a process to document. It was an atmosphere to respond to. His photographs don’t walk you through kesi step by step the way a documentary would. They move between Jingwei’s hands, the threads, the studio details, and the quieter visual textures of Suzhou itself, using the same painterly restraint that shapes his broader work. He described his own approach in a way that cuts straight to the point: photography, he said, is sometimes about forgetting time rather than recording it. What stays in an image isn’t when it was taken but whether it still carries beauty once the moment is gone.

That’s a fairly specific thing to believe in 2026, when the surrounding conversation about images is almost entirely about speed and generation. Anyone can produce a technically competent photo of silk threads in soft light right now without a camera, a plane ticket, or a studio. What that won’t produce is the weeks of presence, of actually being in a room watching another person work, that shapes how Huang sees and frames a subject.

This is where Lexar’s role in the project stops being a footnote. Grace Su, who heads Lexar’s European operations, made the point directly: before any photograph becomes a print, a press image, or a cultural archive, it first exists as an original file that needs to survive. Leica captures the moment. Lexar protects the file behind it. It’s a clean division of labor that gives the brand a genuine reason to be part of this story rather than just attached to it for the optics.

The show itself, titled Threads of Time: A Journey Through Silk and Lens, is presented at Leica Gallery Amsterdam and runs September 11 to 15. Curator Linda Warmerdam framed the exhibition as a dialogue between the photographer’s eye and the artisan’s hand, and that framing holds up, because both of those things require a body in a specific place at a specific time. No model trained on existing images can reproduce that.

You don’t need to care about textile history or gallery culture for the underlying point to land. Some things take real time, happen once, and mean something precisely because they can’t be convincingly faked. Huang spent weeks in a Suzhou studio to understand what kesi actually is. The photographs are what he brought back.

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Felipe Pantone’s Tennis Court Refuses to Look the Same Twice

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A tennis court in Valencia currently looks like it’s sinking into the ground. Walk up to the edge of the one at Casa Axis and the white lines that normally just mark boundaries start pulling inward, stacking through fake layers of chrome and burgundy until the whole surface reads like a hallway you could fall down. It’s called Hard Court 2, painted by Spanish artist Spok Brillor, and it treats a sports court like a living canvas instead of a slab of asphalt everyone stops noticing the week after the ribbon gets cut.

That’s usually the fate of most site-specific art. A muralist gets a wall, a brand throws a launch party, and within a year the piece turns into background noise nobody actually looks at anymore. Sports facilities have it worse. A court gets painted once, and it stays that exact shade of green or blue for a decade, because nobody budgets for touch-ups, let alone reinvention. Casa Axis, the art and design space Felipe Pantone runs out of a 1975 house outside Valencia, didn’t fix that with a bigger maintenance budget. It fixed it with a rule: the court has to change, every single year, by design.

Designer: Spok Brillor

The rule lives inside C.A.I.O., the Casa Axis International Open, a scrappy little tennis tournament for artists that launched in June 2026. No rankings, no categories, no portfolios required. Just instinct, apparently, and a healthy amount of frustration. The twist is what the winner actually takes home. Instead of a trophy, they get handed the responsibility of repainting the court before the next tournament. Win the match, inherit the canvas.

Lucas Benarroch, known as MRKA, painted the first version in 2025, loosening the court’s regulation markings into loose, hand-drawn lines that felt more like a sketch than a sports surface. He then went on to win the inaugural C.A.I.O., which technically put him back in charge of the next transformation. He passed the job to Spok Brillor instead, who had competed against him in the same tournament. That handoff is the part I find genuinely clever. The competition doesn’t just crown a winner, it forces the winner to make a choice about who gets to shape the space next, which quietly turns a tennis match into a succession plan for an ongoing art piece.

Spok took the opposite approach from MRKA. Where MRKA loosened the geometry, Spok tightened it, repeating the court’s own markings inward through metallic gradients until the actual boundaries get harder to read. Deep reds and burgundies contract through rectangular planes, pale blue and yellow lines cross the surface like reflected metal, and the whole thing sits somewhere between an architectural shaft and a painted portal. It took twelve days to finish, and it’s already scheduled to disappear under whoever wins next year.

I like that this thing is built to be temporary on purpose. Most design work chases permanence, a piece that survives, a brand that lasts forever, a finish that never fades. Hard Court 2 does the opposite. It’s designed to be beaten, literally, by the next person good enough to win a tennis match on top of it. That’s a genuinely strange model for how art gets commissioned, and it works specifically because nobody involved is trying to make something that outlives its usefulness.

There’s also something honest about tying the transformation to actual competition rather than a curator’s calendar. Nobody at Casa Axis decided in advance that the court needed a refresh this September. It changed because someone won a match and had to make good on the assignment. That’s a small distinction, but it changes how the whole project feels. It’s less a rotating gallery and more a living structure that happens to have paint on it.

Whether this idea scales beyond one backyard court in L’Eliana is a fair question, and probably a “no” for most places. But the instinct behind it, building change into the rules instead of hoping someone remembers to update things later, feels like it’s worth stealing for a lot more than tennis courts.

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Xiaomi 18 Fold Hands-On: Got Here Before Apple, Can It Beat Samsung?

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Xiaomi has chosen an interesting moment to return to foldables. The company has not released a book-style foldable since the Mix Fold 4, which launched in 2024, and now it is back with the Xiaomi 18 Fold just as compact foldables are starting to get more attention. Samsung has also added a foldable in this compact format to its lineup, and Apple is widely expected to unveil its first foldable iPhone at its September 9 event with a similar form factor in mind.

That puts the Xiaomi 18 Fold in an interesting spot. It is not just Xiaomi coming back to foldables after a break. It is also arriving just as this smaller book-style format looks like it could become the next big thing.

Designer: Xiaomi

Xiaomi is positioning the 18 Fold as its first mid-size flagship foldable. It weighs 7.73 ounces (219g), measures 0.42 inches thick when folded (10.68mm), and opens out to just 0.20 inches thick (5.02mm), with a folded footprint of 4.64 x 3.29 inches (117.8 x 83.6mm). In person, it feels thin, though not unusually thin by the standards of today’s premium foldables. More importantly, it feels expensive in a good way. The matte texture on the back and frame gives it a softer, understated finish, while the rounded corners and flat frame help the phone look clean and modern.

The unit I handled was the deep red version, and it is a bold color in person. It stands out more than the usual black or silver foldable palette without feeling too loud. It also happens to echo the deep red finish rumored for Apple’s first foldable, which makes the comparison hard to miss. The 18 Fold comes in Black, White, Red, and a Ceramic Version.

In practice, though, this is still a two-handed phone whether it is folded or unfolded. Even closed, the body is compact in one sense but still broad enough that I did not think of it as something built for easy one-handed use. That is not really a criticism. It just comes with the territory.

The outer display is a 5.38-inch panel, while the inside opens up to a 7.58-inch main screen. Xiaomi says both displays share the same aspect ratio, which is meant to make the transition from one to the other feel more natural. I could not fully judge how well that works in daily use from a short demo, but one benefit stood out right away. Video felt more immersive than on squarer foldables because there was less black bar space above and below the image.

The software also looked well suited to the shape. Animations felt smooth in my brief demo, and I did see split-screen and floating window support in action. The unfolded UI felt more like a small tablet than a stretched phone, which is what you want on a device like this. Xiaomi has also placed one speaker on the top edge and another on the bottom edge on the opposite side, which should help give the phone a more balanced stereo effect when it is open.

The hinge left a good first impression too. I cannot really say whether it felt especially firm or especially smooth, because my time with the device was limited, but it did feel sturdy. The crease was handled well too. Looking straight at the display, I only really noticed it from certain angles rather than all the time. More importantly, I could barely feel it when running a finger across the center, which was better than I expected.

Left: Xiaomi 18 Fold, Right: Galaxy Z Fold 8

Left: Galaxy Z Fold 8, Right: Xiaomi 18 Fold

Left: Galaxy Z Fold 8, Right: Xiaomi 18 Fold

I also compared the Xiaomi 18 Fold side by side with Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8. Samsung’s device measures 4.88 x 3.22 x 0.38 inches when folded (123.9 x 81.9 x 9.7mm), 6.35 x 4.88 x 0.18 inches when unfolded (161.4 x 123.9 x 4.5cm), and weighs 7.09 ounces (201g), so it is a little lighter and a bit thinner than Xiaomi’s foldable in some areas. But the difference was not just about dimensions. Samsung’s inner screen was noticeably brighter to my eyes. At the same time, the Xiaomi 18 Fold had one practical advantage that stood out immediately. When placed on a desk, it did not wobble, while the Samsung did.

Left: Galaxy Z Fold 8, Right: Xiaomi 18 Fold

Left: Galaxy Z Fold 8, Right: Xiaomi 18 Fold

Top: Xiaomi 18 Fold, Bottom: Galaxy Z Fold 8

The biggest surprise for me was the camera. Xiaomi is using a 200MP Leica triple-camera system, led by a 200MP main camera and backed by a 50MP Leica periscope telephoto with an 80mm equivalent focal length. In my short time with the phone, the telephoto camera was the part that stuck with me most. I tried zoom, and the 3.5x telephoto setup immediately felt like one of the most interesting parts of the device. Stability also felt good even at higher magnification, which made the zoom feel more usable, not just more dramatic. The camera bump also did not seem overly large, and its oval-shaped, two-step raised design gives it some presence without taking over the whole back.

My time with the Xiaomi 18 Fold was brief, and this hands-on really only scratched the surface. Even so, the phone already feels like a polished return to book-style foldables. Pricing starts at RMB 10,999, or roughly $1,640, for the 12GB/256GB model, and Xiaomi said it will be available in China only for now.

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4 New AEG Launches That Are Betting You Never Want to Babysit an Appliance Again

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How we think about home appliances is shifting, and AEG leaned into it at IFA 2026 in Berlin spectacularly. We witnessed four new products, two clear categories, and one throughline: the best appliance is the one you don’t have to manage. From the kitchen counter to the living room floor, AEG is betting that people want outcomes, not processes. After seeing what these four do, that bet looks pretty solid.

The lineup breaks into two groups. Grab-and-go cleaning pairs the ErgoMini handheld vacuum with the Trilobite 8000 GEN2 robot. Set-and-forget cooking covers the 7000 Series OnePot Pasta hob and the 3-in-1 Pizza Oven with Air Fry, two appliances that take truly hands-on kitchen tasks and effortlessly and efficiently handle them for you. These are four distinct products, with one consistent point of view. Here’s what each one actually does, and whether it’s worth caring about.

Grab-and-Go Cleaning

The kind of clean that happens around your life, not instead of it. The ErgoMini and Trilobite GEN2 don’t have much in common physically, but the thinking behind them is identical. Both exist so you spend less time thinking about cleaning, and more time not thinking about it at all.

AEG ErgoMini

The ErgoMini weighs 0.55kg. For context, that’s lighter than most water bottles you’d carry to the gym. Making its world premiere at IFA 2026, it’s a handheld vacuum built around cyclonic technology, which separates dust and debris from the airstream before they reach the filter. That keeps suction strong for up to three times longer between filter cleans than other leading lightweight handhelds in the same class. It also delivers up to 100% dust pick-up, which for something this small and light, is genuinely impressive.

What separates it from the crowd is how much thought went into everyday use. An integrated LED light makes hidden dirt visible on any surface. A blowing mode lets you inflate camping mattresses or force debris out of tight corners before the suction clears it up. USB-C charging means you’re not hunting for proprietary cables, a built-in wall hook keeps it within arm’s reach, and one-step controlled emptying means you’re not wrestling with the bin after every session.

What we like:

  • Cyclonic technology keeps suction strong up to 3x longer between filter cleans than comparable lightweight handheld vacuums
  • The blowing mode is a genuinely useful extra; it doubles as an inflater and a precision debris loosener for tight spaces

AEG Trilobite 8000 GEN2 Robot Vacuum Cleaner

At 7.89cm tall, less than the height of a standard drink can, the Trilobite 8000 GEN2 is built to get into spaces most robot vacuums simply cannot reach. Under low sofas, beneath beds, along baseboards that other robots skip. It vacuums, mops, and self-dries. Compared to its predecessor, it packs up to 40% more suction power and delivers 100% large-debris pick-up. Advanced LiDAR navigation combined with the ability to identify more than 200 different obstacles means it moves through your home with real confidence, not just randomness.

The All-in-One station is what makes the hands-free promise real. It automatically washes and dries the mop pads, empties the debris bin, and keeps things running for up to 30 days without you needing to touch anything. The AEG App, which has earned both a 2025 Red Dot Design Award and a 2026 iF Design Award, handles room mapping, zone control, and scheduling in a few taps. Privacy is also built into the hardware: no microphone, on-device image processing only, and nothing uploaded to the cloud. That last part is a genuinely reassuring detail in a product category where it’s rarely addressed.

What we like:

  • The 7.89cm profile means it gets under furniture that stops most other robot vacuums cold
  • Up to 30 days of hands-free operation through the All-in-One station is a meaningful reduction in the weekly maintenance load

Set-and-Forget Cooking

Great food, with a lot less time standing over the stove. Cooking well has always required attention. AEG is making the case that it doesn’t have to anymore. These two appliances handle the hard parts – the heat control, the timing, the watching – so the only thing left for you to do is eat.

AEG 7000 Series OnePot Pasta Hob

Pasta is one of those things everyone assumes is easy, right up until they’re standing at the stove, adjusting heat, watching the clock, and stirring every couple of minutes while still trying to finish the rest of the meal. AEG’s 7000 Series OnePot Pasta hob removes all of that. You pick your portions, load the ingredients into the accompanying pot, close the lid, and step away. Fifteen minutes later, you have pasta al dente with a naturally creamy sauce. No hovering, no guesswork required.

This isn’t just convenience at the cost of quality. AEG partnered with the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo in Italy for a blind sensory test, putting OnePot results in front of more than 100 participants alongside traditionally cooked pasta. OnePot held its own. The hob itself runs on induction with temperature sensors handling the process automatically, and it’s built on AEG’s XTM series platform with the SaphirMatt® surface, which shows up to ten times fewer visible scratches than a standard hob.

What we like:

  • Al dente pasta with a creamy sauce in 15 minutes, fully automated, with zero stirring or heat-adjusting required
  • SaphirMatt® surface resists scratching significantly better than standard hob finishes, so the look doesn’t deteriorate with use

AEG 3-in-1 Pizza Oven with Air Fry

Most home ovens top out around 250°C, which is exactly why your pizza at home never quite matches what comes out of a pizzeria. AEG’s 3-in-1 Pizza Oven with Air Fry hits 380°C and cooks a pizza in two and a half minutes. A 13-litre cavity fits a 30cm pie, dual viewing windows let you watch the crust without opening the door, and the whole thing has already earned a Red Dot Design Award, so it looks as good sitting on the counter as it performs.

Five preset pizza functions cover the most popular styles: Romana, Sicilian, Bianca, Calzone, and frozen. Each dials in a specific cooking profile, which means you’re not experimenting your way to a good result. AEG’s own research found that nearly three in five European pizza lovers would cook from scratch more often if they could consistently hit restaurant quality at home. This is a direct answer to that. The air fryer and full oven modes aren’t just filler either; they make this genuinely versatile kit rather than a single-use novelty.

What we like:

  • 380°C maximum temperature and a 2.5-minute cook time genuinely rival pizzeria conditions at a fraction of the cost
  • Five dedicated pizza modes cover the most popular styles and remove the guesswork from getting each one right

The Appliance That Actually Changes How You Live

What AEG brought to IFA 2026 isn’t four product launches dressed in a shared theme. It’s one argument, made four different ways. Appliances should do the work they promise, then stay out of your way. The OnePot Pasta hob and 3-in-1 Pizza Oven close the gap between wanting good food and having time to make it. The ErgoMini and Trilobite GEN2 do the same on the other side of the door.

If I had to pick one, it’s the Trilobite 8000 GEN2. I have a low sectional sofa that standard robot vacuums physically cannot fit under, which has quietly become the dustiest corner of my apartment. A 7.89cm profile changes that completely. Add 30 days of hands-free operation, and I’m barely involved at all. That’s not just a feature list. That’s the kind of quiet upgrade that actually changes how you live.

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Most Rugged Phones Hide From Heat, This One Has Two Fans to Fight It

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Rugged phones have always made a quiet trade-off. Sealing a device against water and dust means sealing in heat too, and that trapped warmth forces powerful chips to slow themselves down right when gaming or heavy use needs them most. OUKITEL’s WP600, unveiled at IFA 2026, treats that compromise as something worth engineering around, building visible cooling straight into its armor rather than hiding the problem under a tougher shell.

That solution shows up immediately on the back of the phone, where two turbine-style fans sit inside an octagonal housing next to the camera lenses. Rather than tucking cooling components away, OUKITEL frames them as part of the visual identity, finished in a gunmetal tone with RGB lighting that shifts through purples, oranges, and blues while the fans spin during demanding sessions.

Designer: Oukitel

Underneath that display sits a MediaTek Dimensity 8300 chip running at 3.35GHz, paired with up to 24GB of RAM and a full terabyte of storage in its top configuration. Active airflow means that hardware can stay at full speed through a long gaming session in direct sun, instead of throttling the moment internal temperatures climb, the usual fate of sealed devices pushed hard outdoors.

A 10,000mAh battery backs up that sustained performance, large enough to outlast a full day of mixed use, camera work, and gaming without needing a midday top-up. When charging is needed, 45W wired input gets things moving again quickly, keeping downtime short for anyone relying on the phone through fieldwork, travel, or a weekend away from outlets.

Privacy gets a physical answer instead of a software toggle buried in settings. A dedicated switch, styled as a bright red accent against the phone’s black and metallic paneling, physically disconnects the camera, microphone, and GPS at once. It is the kind of control that matters to fieldworkers or anyone stepping into a sensitive meeting who wants certainty that nothing is listening or tracking, not just a setting that claims to be off.

The rest of the chassis carries that same rugged-but-considered language throughout. Exposed hex screws, ridged texture strips along the frame, and a carbon-fiber-patterned panel insert surrounding the camera module all read as intentional detailing rather than leftover industrial parts. A 6.8-inch, 120Hz display handles the front, while the whole package comes finished in either black or yellow, playing into the tool-like character rugged phones usually lean into.

None of this asks buyers to choose between toughness and capability anymore. A phone built to survive drops and submersion can still run demanding software at full tilt, provided the cooling behind it gets treated as a design feature rather than an afterthought bolted on for a spec sheet.

The post Most Rugged Phones Hide From Heat, This One Has Two Fans to Fight It first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most Sleep Trackers Grade Last Night, but DUVA One Adjusts Tonight

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Most sleep trackers wait until morning to tell a story that’s already over. A person tosses through a noisy night, wakes up groggy, and gets handed a score explaining what went wrong hours after it happened, with no chance to fix anything while it mattered. DUVA One, introduced at IFA Berlin 2026, moves that entire conversation into the middle of the night itself, treating disruptions as something to respond to in real time rather than data to review at breakfast.

The system builds its response around two simultaneous points of view. Inside the ear, PPG and motion sensors track heart rate, HRV, movement, and sleep position throughout the night. Sitting beside the bed, the charging case reads the room itself, picking up noise, light, temperature, and humidity, then lining that environmental data up against what’s happening in the body at the exact same moment.

Designer: DUVA (Fitnexa)

That pairing turns a random 3 AM wakeup into something with an actual cause. A spike in movement paired with a sudden noise spike tells a different story than one paired with a temperature swing, and DUVA One uses that context to decide what to do next. It can dial in active noise cancelation, layer in sound masking, or switch on sleep audio, then keep watching to see whether the response actually helped or needs adjusting.

Audio handling reflects the same instinct toward reading the moment instead of locking into one setting at bedtime. Someone might drift off with a podcast streaming over Bluetooth, and once DUVA One detects sleep, it can quietly hand off to locally stored sleep audio, cutting the connection while trimming power use for the rest of the night. It’s a small transition, but it removes the usual choice between falling asleep to something and burning battery doing it.

All of that would be pointless if the earbuds themselves got in the way of actual sleeping, making you prefer not to have them on at all. DUVA built each one down to a 9.9mm profile at roughly 3.3g, sized specifically for people who sleep on their sides and need something that won’t dig into an ear against a pillow for eight hours straight. Multiple tip and stabilizer wing sizes come along to fit that shape to different ears rather than forcing a single mold.

Morning wakeups get the same considered touch through a private, offline alarm that builds in volume gradually, with snooze options set directly through the earbuds instead of reaching for a phone. On the data side, DUVA draws a clear line around privacy, skipping conversation recording or raw audio storage entirely, while letting users switch off individual sensors or erase their history outright. DUVA One arrives in October 2026 at $349.99, targeting the US, Canada, UK, EU, and Australia.

The post Most Sleep Trackers Grade Last Night, but DUVA One Adjusts Tonight first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most E-Readers Don’t Survive the Commute, This Tiny One Does

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Word is spreading out of IFA 2026 about a tiny e-reader that fits in a pocket the way a stick of gum does, and it’s already reframing what a dedicated reading device should look like. The BOOX Picco pairs a 3.97-inch E Ink touchscreen with a footprint closer to a smartphone than a book. It’s a shape decision, not a spec sheet decision, and it changes how the device fits into a day.

Pick it up next to one of BOOX’s larger notebook-style readers and the size difference stops being subtle. The Picco disappears into a coat pocket or sits flat against a wallet, while its sibling devices demand a bag. That physical gap is the whole pitch. A book you have to remember to bring competes with a phone you never put down. A book that already lives in your pocket doesn’t need to compete with anything.

Designer: BOOX

Physical buttons run along one edge, tuned for page turns with separate short-press and long-press actions, so a thumb can move through the buttons on a train platform without needing to squint at a menu. A front light switch and power button sit alongside them, laid out as simple raised circles rather than crowded icons. The touchscreen handles gestures like swiping back or returning home, giving the Picco two ways to get around depending on the situation.

Storage stays refreshingly analog. Instead of packing in onboard memory, the Picco leans on a microSD card, treating your library as something swappable rather than sealed in. Files move over via USB-C or WiFi through a companion app, both quicker options than earlier tiny readers offered. It’s a small engineering choice that says something about who this device is built for: people who already have a shelf of digital books and just want a lighter way to carry them.

The software strips things down further. Instead of a full Android build, the Picco runs on a leaner Linux-based system, and the interface reflects that restraint. Icons for a handful of apps, Images, Pomodoro, Reading Stats, Todo, and Countdown, sit as plain circles on a clean home screen. There’s no algorithmic feed hiding behind a swipe, just a bookshelf, a settings menu, and a way to receive files.

None of this reads as a shrunken flagship. It reads like a device built around a single decision: reading should require less friction than checking a phone, not more. A commute, a waiting room, a lunch break; the Picco is sized for exactly those in-between stretches where a full-size reader feels like overkill and a phone feels like a trap.

Pricing chatter points to around $100 (roughly matching entry-level tablets), with a possible release by the end of 2026, though BOOX has yet to confirm the finer details. What’s already clear from the hands-on looks is that the design logic holds up. Small screens force fewer words per page, but they also force fewer excuses not to read at all.

The post Most E-Readers Don’t Survive the Commute, This Tiny One Does first appeared on Yanko Design.