Tag Archives: lighting

This Glowing Jello Table Lamp Balances Softness and Structure

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There is something inherently temporary about jello. It trembles, folds, and gives way under the slightest pressure. Balloon sculptures behave much the same way, holding their shape only until the air begins to escape. MAJU’s Jello Lamp takes these fleeting forms and gives them permanence.

Designed by Hyu Lim, the sculptural table light translates the soft wobble of gelatin desserts and the inflated curves of balloon animals into a 3D-printed object. The result is playful without becoming novelty-driven, balancing generous proportions and rounded edges with the visual precision of digital fabrication. The lamp’s form is built around repetition. A fluted shade expands outward in soft, scalloped volumes, while the base continues the same inflated geometry below. Together, the two elements create a silhouette that appears almost compressible, despite being printed as a rigid, continuous body.

Designer: MAJU

That tension gives the lamp much of its character. Its shape suggests movement, softness and instability, while its construction fixes those qualities in place. MAJU uses one of the most controlled contemporary production methods to capture something loose and unpredictable. When illuminated, the object begins to soften again. Light passes through the translucent shade, diffusing into a warm 2700K glow that gathers along the ridged surface. The flutes become less defined, and the lamp takes on a fluid, almost edible quality.

It is here that the Jello Lamp moves beyond a visual reference. Rather than simply resembling a moulded dessert, it recreates its translucency and sense of suspended volume. The light source becomes part of the form, turning the lamp into an illuminated sculpture rather than a fixture with a decorative shade. Each piece is 3D printed to order in MAJU’s workshops in California and Singapore using plant-based, biodegradable PLA. The process allows the studio to produce the lamp’s curved geometry without conventional moulds, while also reducing excess inventory and material waste.

The visible texture of additive manufacturing is not concealed. Fine printed ridges run across the surface, catching light and revealing how the object was made. Instead of disrupting its softness, they add another layer of detail, sitting somewhere between the grooves of a dessert mould and the traces of a machine-built object.

The lamp is also designed as a modular system. Its shade and base can be replaced or upgraded independently, extending the life of the object rather than treating it as a sealed product. An integrated cord organiser is built into the base, keeping the cable from interrupting the lamp’s compact silhouette. Measuring 9.5 × 9.5 × 12.25 inches and weighing approximately half a pound, the Jello Lamp is light enough to move easily through domestic spaces. Its 2.9W bulb is intended to produce ambient illumination, positioning it as a quiet atmospheric object rather than a primary source of light.

Shown in Cottage Core Pink, the design leans into its confectionery associations. The colour, rounded profile and luminous surface recall something sweet and familiar, while the printed construction keeps the object rooted in contemporary production.

The Jello Lamp forms part of MAJU’s broader collection of plant-based home objects, shaped by the studio’s position between Singapore and California and by a combination of Eastern and Western design influences. Its most compelling quality, however, lies in a simpler contradiction. The lamp gives durability to forms that are usually defined by their impermanence. A balloon loses air. Jello collapses. Here, their softness is held in place, glowing quietly on a table.

The post This Glowing Jello Table Lamp Balances Softness and Structure first appeared on Yanko Design.

Artefilo Makes Home Objects From Elephant Grass and Hospital Cabinets

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The sustainable home goods market has a specific credibility problem. Products marketed as eco-conscious often get there through incremental adjustments, reducing a percentage of virgin plastic, switching to a recyclable box, or sourcing from a slightly shorter supply chain. The result is a kind of sustainability theater that satisfies certification requirements without fundamentally changing either what objects are made from or how they find their way into a home.

Artefilo approaches that question differently. Based in Edam in the Netherlands, the independent design atelier makes contemporary home objects from materials most manufacturers wouldn’t consider: elephant grass combined with recycled plastic, reclaimed wood fibres, brick dust, and salvaged hospital cabinetry. Each piece is made locally in small batches, and the materials are chosen with the specific intention of giving discarded resources a renewed place in a living space.

Designer: Guido Baratta

The choice of Edam isn’t incidental. The city has a long tradition of ceramics craftsmanship, and Artefilo draws on that heritage without replicating it, taking the spirit of making by hand and applying it to a different material palette. Elephant grass combined with recycled plastic, for example, produces a surface that reads as handmade pottery without the environmental cost of extracting virgin clay or new plastic.

The rest of the material list is equally unexpected. Reclaimed wood fibres and brick dust bring texture and warmth to objects that might otherwise feel too composed, while recycled hospital cabinets contribute rigidity and durability that wouldn’t be obvious from the source. Finding these materials requires locating waste streams that industry hasn’t already claimed, then working out what form they can credibly take in a domestic setting.

Making in small batches has real consequences for what the objects can be. It means pieces that are genuinely one-of-a-kind, because material conditions are never exactly repeatable from one batch to the next. Brick dust carries different tones from different sources; reclaimed wood fibres vary in density and grain. That variability isn’t a flaw in the production model; it’s built into it deliberately.

The underlying premise is that objects shape the atmosphere of a space, not dramatically, but persistently. Something placed on a windowsill or bookshelf gets seen many times a day, and that repetition adds up. Artefilo’s design philosophy treats each piece as something that participates in the daily texture of a home rather than simply occupying it. The materials reinforce that, each carrying a visible trace of its previous life.

The atelier distributes through its own online store and through a local stockist in Edam. The collection is small, deliberately so, and the material sourcing means it isn’t trying to scale into something it isn’t. For a design category that often talks about slowing down without quite managing it, Artefilo appears to have structured itself around that idea from the ground up.

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Meet The Lamp That’s Actually Grown, Not Made

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If you’ve never thought about bacteria as a design material before, Cenit might be the thing that changes that for you. The latest lighting collection from the collaboration between biotechnology company Polybion and Mexico-based design studio Natural Urbano is doing something genuinely different from what most lighting brands are doing right now, and it’s worth paying attention to.

To understand Cenit, you have to know a little about what came before it. Lapso was their first major collaboration: a sculptural pendant lamp handcrafted from five sheets of cultivated bacterial cellulose, a translucent, flexible material called Celium™ that Polybion grows using bacteria. Not synthetically manufactured. Not extracted from a forest. Grown, from bacteria, using agricultural waste. Lapso was already a bold statement when it debuted at the London Design Festival in 2025. Each lamp came with a certificate of authenticity and a two-month production lead time, because you can’t rush biology.

Designers: Polybion x Natural Urbano

Cenit follows that same philosophy but takes it further. For the first time, the duo has combined Celium™ with natural ash wood and stainless steel, bringing the material into a more structured, versatile family of lighting objects. The collection comes in both pendant and table formats, which is a smart move that Lapso didn’t make. Lapso was undeniably sculptural, a piece you’d plan a room around. Cenit feels like it wants to live with you in your home across different spaces and moods, without demanding all the attention in the room.

The specific variant used here is Celium™ Manto, layered in a way that calls to mind the gradients of a horizon. The collection’s name, Cenit, means zenith in Spanish, the highest point in the sky, and the visual reference lands. When light passes through the layered cellulose, it does something that no synthetic material can fully replicate. It glows with an organic warmth, the kind you usually only get from paper or natural stone, but lighter and more alive-feeling.

A lot of sustainable design still requires us to compromise somewhere. Rougher edges. Less refined finishes. A feeling that the eco-credentials come at the cost of beauty. Cenit does not ask that of you. The combination of ash and Celium™ Manto is genuinely beautiful, in a way that’s considered and deliberate rather than rustic or raw. The stainless steel elements give it structure without weight. The ash brings warmth without heaviness. And the cellulose does what it always does in Polybion’s hands: it makes you stop and look.

Beyond the material, what makes this collaboration particularly interesting is where it’s coming from. Natural Urbano, founded by Sebastián Beltrán and Lorena Márquez, and Polybion, based in Guanajuato, are actively positioning Mexico as a place where design and biotechnology meet at a serious, global level. That’s not a small thing. The conversation about sustainable and biofabricated design has historically centered on European studios and Scandinavian minimalism. Watching a Mexican collaboration work at this level, with this degree of craft and material innovation, feels significant.

The pendant and table formats in Cenit also suggest that Polybion and Natural Urbano are thinking about a longer game. Moving from a collectible sculptural piece like Lapso into a more scalable, multi-format collection points to the kind of ambition that doesn’t just want to make a beautiful object. It wants to change what beautiful objects are made from, and it’s doing that without sacrificing the craft or the story behind the material.

Biofabricated materials are still a niche, but collections like Cenit make the niche feel a lot less obscure. When something looks this considered and lives this comfortably in a real interior, it becomes a lot easier to imagine a future where Celium™ shows up in more homes, more spaces, more everyday things. Cenit is the kind of work that makes you want to ask more questions about what your objects are made of, and that, as far as I’m concerned, is exactly what good design is supposed to do.

The post Meet The Lamp That’s Actually Grown, Not Made first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Stabilo Table Lamp puts the ‘Light’ in Highlighter!

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Creatives see the world very differently from how the rest of us do. Someone sees a binder clip, a creative sees a miniature handbag, someone sees a fork, a creative holds the fork close to their eyes to simulate being in a prison cell. Someone sees a highlighter as a piece of stationery used to make text prominent, Jane Morelli saw the ‘light’ in highlighter, turning it into a tabletop lamp every stationery nerd will absolutely love.

Modeled on the iconic Stabilo highlighter, Morelli’s Stabilo Lamp is an unofficial tabletop lamp that turns the fluorescent tip of a highlighter into a literal light source. Designed to be roughly a foot tall, the lamp comes with a cord – plug it in, switch it on, and the tip glows in its signature color. Morelli’s designed the lamp in 3 common colors for now, neon yellow, pink, and green. I say unofficial because this is purely fan-made visual punnery – but Stabilo did comment on Morelli’s post, marveling at her idea.

Designer: Emanuele Jane Morelli

The lamp is witty, fun, and caters to a highly specific niche. Not everyone wants to celebrate stationery in such a literal way, but for the people who do, this is an absolute win. The lamp is modeled on the short Stabilo highlighters, the proportions have been adjusted to ensure the base doesn’t overpower the actual light source – something that bright is sure to command one’s attention, but it mustn’t steal it. The showstopper is the nib, a cloudy, translucent element with a powerful light source underneath that causes it to glow once switched on. A tinted ‘lampshade’ in the form of a highlighter cover sits on top, acting as a visual and physical barrier from the light source.

The lamp’s pretty tiny, as is its light source. Don’t expect it to produce enough light to let you read a book. Its sole job is to emit a warm, diffused glow akin to a lava lamp, setting the mood with a nerdy panache that only will appeal to stationery lovers and people with a quirky personality. You won’t see this in an edition of Architecture Digest, or an eclectic Airbnb. Then again, to be honest, you won’t see this anywhere because Morelli’s work is currently just a concept.

However, with enough attention, Morelli could totally build a working prototype and take this to production. Stabilo definitely loved the idea, and this isn’t the first time we’ve seen designers garner attention on their work on social media and get enough validation to turn them into real products. David Delahunty’s work is a brilliant example of how creative thinking and visual puns can turn into real merch and a genuine business. Morelli, if you’re reading this, I’d suggest busting out your 3D printer, heading down to Home Depot or the like, and putting together a prototype!

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Erwan Bouroullec’s Lamps Leave the Last Design Decision to You

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Most lighting products arrive complete. You unbox them, install them, and that’s basically the end of the story. Maap, the new wall lamp by Erwan Bouroullec for Flos, works a little differently. Before you can hang it on your wall, you have to crumple it. Not metaphorically. Actually crumple it, by hand.

The diffuser at the heart of Maap is made from Tyvek, the ultra-thin synthetic material most commonly associated with shipping envelopes and construction wrap. Bouroullec chose it specifically for its behavior: when crumpled, it holds its shape, forming a microstructure of ridges and folds that stabilizes the lamp’s form and scatters light in a way no factory process could replicate. Two people installing the same model will end up with two completely different objects. That’s not a design flaw. That’s the entire point.

Designer: Erwan Bouroullec

Bouroullec has been thinking about expansive light for a long time. “Maap is the realization of a long-held desire to create expansive light sources that diffuse illumination across a broad surface,” he says. “This results in a subtle, immersive glow that surrounds you, spreading softly and evenly.” The lamp reportedly took years to develop and, at one point, resisted being drawn in traditional technical schematics because its final form simply couldn’t be predetermined. How do you draft a blueprint for something that depends on a human gesture?

The structure underneath the crumpled Tyvek is precise and deliberate. A cross-shaped mount attaches to the wall, and the diffuser shell clips on magnetically. Each unit runs four LED bulbs, and multiple units can be combined to scale the piece up. The smallest configuration is a single panel. At its largest, Maap can stretch over three metres across a wall, which at that scale stops being a lamp and starts becoming an installation. Flos describes it as an “alchemical wall installation,” and while that kind of language gets applied liberally by lighting brands, here it actually feels earned.

What I keep thinking about is how Maap challenges the standard relationship between designer and buyer. Usually, a piece of furniture or lighting arrives as a closed system. The designer made every call, and your only role is placement. Maap breaks that contract in the most tactile, satisfying way. Bouroullec built the architecture; you determine the texture. It reframes ownership not as possession but as participation.

That’s also a slightly risky ask. Not everyone wants to be handed creative responsibility over something they just spent serious money on. For people who need a predictable aesthetic outcome, Maap might feel genuinely unsettling. But for the person who already treats their home as a living, evolving thing rather than a finished project, it’s a quietly compelling offer. You can reshape it. You can start over. If you move, you can detach the diffuser from the wall, re-crumple it, and begin again in a new space. The lamp is designed to be shaped, reshaped, and interpreted by the person living with it.

Bouroullec has long approached design as something environmental rather than decorative. “I see design as part of a whole. Designs need to cooperate with a given environment and somehow enhance it.” Maap feels like one of the clearest expressions of that belief. It doesn’t arrive with a fixed visual identity or a demand that you style your room around it. It adapts, which turns out to be a fairly rare quality in a market that often values visual consistency above everything else.

Maap is available now through Flos flagship stores and Design Within Reach, its exclusive U.S. launch partner. It comes in three sizes, Wall 1, Wall 2, and Wall 3. The material is white, the glow is soft, and the rest is entirely up to you.

Whether this becomes a reference point in lighting design or stays a beautiful one-off experiment, it’s hard to look at Maap without feeling like something genuinely fresh is being proposed. At a time when design often cycles through familiar references, that still counts for something.

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This $70 Japanese Candle Burns From the Inside Out & Lights a Room Better Than Anything Else on Your Shelf

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Most candles do one thing: burn down and disappear. The wax melts, the light fades, and what you are left with is an empty vessel and a faint smell of something vaguely floral. The Japanese Lantern Candle does not follow that logic. Rooted in the design of the chouchin, the traditional paper lanterns that once lit up festival streets and the doorways of old izakayas, this candle holder holds its shape while the flame quietly does its work inside. The outer wax never melts. The light does.

What changes as the candle burns is the experience. The inner candle gradually hollows out, and as it does, the light begins filtering through the undulating surface of the outer shell in a slow, shifting pattern that is difficult to look away from. Handmade by craftsmen in Kurashiki, Japan, it carries the kind of quiet specificity that separates an object made with intention from one made for convenience. That distinction is easy to feel the moment it is lit.

Click Here to Buy Now: $70.00

The Light That Stays

The patented technology behind the outer shell is what makes this candle worth understanding. Conventional candles collapse inward as the wax disappears, which means the design and the light disappear with them. Here, the outer layer holds its form throughout the life of the candle. The undulating surface was not designed purely for aesthetics, though it earns its place on that front as well. As the inner flame burns lower, the light catches and bends through the curves of the shell in a way that shifts with the burn, giving the candle a different quality of light at the end of its life than at the beginning. It is a slow reveal rather than a slow fade.

Crafted in Kurashiki, Designed for Stillness

Kurashiki is a city in Okayama Prefecture with a long history of textile craft and traditional artisanship. The candles made there carry that lineage in the way they are finished. Each one is handmade, which means no two are entirely identical, and the minimalist exterior reflects a restrained design philosophy that integrates into most interior spaces without demanding attention. It works on a bedside table, a bathroom shelf, or the center of a dining surface. The intention behind it, a calming ritual to mark the end of the day, is built into the form itself. You do not need to think about how to use it. You simply light it.

What We Like

  • Patented outer shell technology: the wax casing holds its structure as the inner candle burns, preserving the lantern form and the quality of the glow through the entire life of the candle
  • Handcrafted in Kurashiki, Japan: made by artisans in a city with a genuine tradition of craft, which shows in the finish and the material consistency
  • Undulating surface design: as the inner flame burns through, the light catches and moves across the curved surface in a way that no flat-sided candle can replicate
  • Minimalist aesthetic: the design integrates into contemporary and traditional interiors equally, without the visual noise of decorative candles that prioritize appearance over atmosphere

What We Dislike

  • No replacement candle system specified: the product does not make clear whether inner candles can be sourced and replaced once the original burns out, which affects the long-term value of the outer shell
  • Limited availability: with only a small number left in stock and no confirmed restock date, it is the kind of object that disappears before most people know it exists

A Ritual Worth Keeping

There is a particular kind of object that earns a permanent place in a room not because it demands to be noticed but because the room feels different without it. The Japanese Lantern Candle belongs to that category. It does not perform. It simply holds the light in a way that slows the room down, which is the point of the chouchin tradition it draws from, and the point of any ritual worth building around the end of a day.

If the candles currently on your shelf burn flat and leave nothing behind, this is the straightforward upgrade. At $70.00, it is the cost of something made by hand, in one place, for one purpose. Pick it up before the remaining stock is gone.

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Snow Peak Just Shrank Its Beloved Hozuki to a $15 Keychain

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Good design has a way of making you question what you’ve been putting up with. I’ve carried the same clunky keychain flashlight for years, and every time I dig for it in the dark, I think: surely someone has figured out a better version of this. Snow Peak just answered that question with the Micro Hozuki, and the answer happens to weigh five grams.

The Micro Hozuki is the newest and smallest addition to Snow Peak’s Hozuki lantern family, a line that has quietly earned a devoted following since the original launched roughly two decades ago. If you’re new to the Hozuki story, here’s the short version: Snow Peak designed it as a deliberate departure from the harsh, utility-first lighting that dominated camping gear at the time. They chose a round, soft silhouette. They opted for silicone rubber shades instead of hard plastic. They prioritized warmth and mood over raw brightness, which was a genuinely bold call when bright white LEDs were the prevailing standard. And they added a flickering mode, sensor-driven, that makes the light sway and dim gently in response to the breeze around it. That detail alone took up 80% of the development time. It’s the kind of thing that sounds excessive until you see it in person, and then it makes perfect sense.

Designer: Snow Peak

The Micro Hozuki carries that same spirit into a form factor that fits between your fingers. At 0.9 inches in diameter and 5 grams without batteries, it’s small in a way that feels almost implausible. The body is ABS resin with a polycarbonate shell, the shade is silicone rubber, and the attachment ring is stainless steel. An included carabiner lets it clip to keychains, tent zippers, bag loops, or jacket pulls without any additional gear required. It just lives there until you need it.

Performance-wise, the numbers are intentionally humble. On its highest setting, the Micro Hozuki reaches 27 lumens, which Snow Peak notes is about two to three times brighter than a candle. That’s not enough to navigate a trail in complete darkness, and it’s not pretending to be. On low, it settles at 2.8 lumens and stretches its battery life to 31 hours. It also includes a flash mode for emergency signaling and a lock function to prevent accidental activation while it’s riding in a pocket or a bag. The IPX5 waterproof rating means rain is a non-issue. It runs on two CR1632 coin batteries, which is the one minor frustration in an otherwise clean package. USB-C would have been a more convenient choice, but at $14.95, it’s not a deal-breaker.

Three colorways are available: Morning Mist, Night Sky, and Twilight. On paper, those names sound like they belong in a spa brochure, but in practice the palette is muted, thoughtful, and very Snow Peak. The brand has always understood that its buyers care as much about how a thing looks as how it performs, and the Micro Hozuki doesn’t abandon that commitment just because it’s priced at fifteen dollars.

My honest take is that the Micro Hozuki is the kind of product that makes you reframe what gear is actually for. Not every tool needs to be the most powerful version of itself. Not every piece of equipment needs to do everything. Sometimes what matters is showing up quietly, doing its job well, and looking good while it does it. The real use cases for something like this are mundane and frequent: finding your keys at the front door, reading a page without waking someone up, flagging your tent in a dark campsite, walking home after a late dinner. Good design earns its place in those small moments.

Snow Peak built the original Hozuki around the idea that beauty and comfort belong outdoors just as much as performance does. The Micro Hozuki takes that argument off the trail and into the everyday. At fifteen dollars, it’s one of the easier cases for good design you’ll come across this year.

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A Duck, Some Bent Tubes, and the Most Charming Lamp of 2026

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The first thing you notice is the yellow. Not a soft, hedging yellow, but a full-commitment, matte, warm yellow that coats every millimeter of the piece without apology. Then you notice the shape. A long, arching neck. Two sturdy legs. A horizontal head that doubles as the light source. Duke, the table lamp designed by Liam de la Bedoyere of Bored Eye Design, is a duck. More precisely, it’s a duck drawn by someone who decided that one continuous tube was all they needed.

That’s the central idea, and it’s worth sitting with. De la Bedoyere’s design vocabulary here is essentially a single rule: take a tube, bend it, and let the animal emerge from the bends. No additional elements, no decorative flourishes, no mixed materials. Just the tube, its curves, and the form they describe. The result is a piece that communicates immediately. You read it as an animal before you register that it’s a lamp, which is the correct order of things.

Designer: Liam de la Bedoyere

Up close, the construction rewards attention. The tubular sections connect in visible segments, and those joints give the piece a modular, almost architectural quality that tempers the playfulness with something more considered. The bends themselves are generous and smooth, with a radiused curve that keeps everything feeling soft rather than rigid. The head is a cylinder open at the end, functioning as the spotlight, and that detail is quietly clever. The light doesn’t interrupt the form. It completes it, pointing forward from the duck’s snout like the whole thing was always meant to do exactly this.

The base is a flat circular disc, minimal and low to the surface. Two legs rise from it and immediately branch into the body, giving the lamp a planted, grounded stance that stops it from reading as fragile. And then there’s the cord, a braided yellow cable that matches the body exactly, looping out near the base. Most designers treat the cord as a problem to solve or something to hide. Here it’s an afterthought that became a feature, trailing away from the lamp like a tail. It’s one of those small decisions that reveals how thoroughly this design was thought through.

The monochromatic yellow does something important for how the silhouette reads. By removing any tonal contrast within the piece itself, the animal form becomes purer and more immediate. Your eye traces the outline rather than getting pulled into detail, which is exactly what you want from a lamp that’s also functioning as sculpture. The color also travels. Looking at Duke placed against warm wood, concrete, white walls, and natural linen, it doesn’t clash with any of them. Yellow at this saturation and matte finish is warmer than it is aggressive, and it reads more like a material choice than a color choice.

The design is also genuinely versatile, which isn’t something you can say about most statement objects. Duke works in a child’s bedroom because it looks like a toy. It works on a bookshelf or a credenza in an adult living space because the construction is clean and the form is abstract enough to read as sculptural. Place it next to a magazine on a coffee table and it looks like something you’d find in a design gallery. That range of contexts isn’t accidental. It comes from the clarity of the underlying concept. When a design is resolved at the idea level, it adapts.

What makes Duke feel significant beyond its charm is that de la Bedoyere is clearly developing a language, not just making individual pieces. The Flamingo Lamp came first, and the same logic runs through both, which means the interest is in the system as much as the object. A lamp collection built entirely on the premise of one continuous tube tracing an animal is a genuinely interesting editorial position for a designer to take. It’s a constraint that produces rather than limits, and that’s the kind of thinking that tends to produce lasting work.

Duke doesn’t try to do many things. It tries to do one thing very well, and in design, that’s harder than it sounds.

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Kids’ Tech Has a Screen Problem: This $139 Button Is the Fix

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Getting kids through morning and bedtime routines is one of those parenting problems that never quite gets solved. Apps on tablets and phones have tried, but the device that’s supposed to help with brushing teeth is the same one that can pull up YouTube. Most parents end up nagging anyway, just now with a screen involved. The category of kids’ tech hasn’t really made mornings easier. It’s made them busier.

Skylight Buddy takes a different approach. It’s a purpose-built bedside device for children ages 4 to 10, with a touchscreen, a speaker, a built-in nightlight, and a physical action button. What it doesn’t have is just as deliberate: no internet access, no browser, no downloadable apps, no camera, and no microphone. It launched in June 2026, and its first production run sold out within a week.

Designer: level Design

The core interaction is simple. Buddy guides kids through their morning, after-school, and bedtime tasks one at a time, showing each with clear on-screen visuals. When a task is done, the child presses the action button on top to confirm, advance to the next step, and collect stars. The design team pushed hard to keep that physical button rather than defaulting to a screen-only approach.

The button is yellow across all three colorways, which serves a functional purpose. It’s the brightest thing on the device, a deliberate visual signal that reads as “press me” from across the room. Buddy comes in blue, sage, and lavender, each with a soft silicone case that wasn’t designed as an accessory but as part of the form. With the case on, the side speaker sits flush with the body.

The integrated light handles two things that parents often buy as separate products: a nightlight for bedtime and an OK-to-wake signal for mornings, so younger kids know when it’s actually time to get up. Add a sound machine for winding down at night and an alarm clock for starting the day, and Buddy replaces a collection of single-purpose devices that typically end up crowding a child’s nightstand.

Buddy works as a standalone device right out of the box, covering routines, chores, the alarm clock, and all core features without any additional cost. Families who already use Skylight Calendar can link the two through the same parent app, syncing a child’s tasks and rewards automatically. A Buddy Plus subscription unlocks additional tools, including rewards tracking, visual timers, and nudges for transitions that are harder to manage.

At $139, it isn’t a cheap clock, but it’s also not competing with tablets or general-purpose screens. That’s the point. Kids can’t download apps on it, can’t open a browser, and can’t drift into videos once their tasks are done. For a category of products that’s gotten very good at capturing children’s attention for all the wrong reasons, Buddy’s restraint is its most compelling feature.

The post Kids’ Tech Has a Screen Problem: This $139 Button Is the Fix first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Amica Collection Finds Poetry in Paper, Clay, and Glow

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The Amica lighting collection brings together organic form, traditional craft, and sculptural illumination in a way that feels quiet, warm, and carefully considered. Made up of pendant, table, and wall-mounted lights, the collection treats lighting as more than a practical object. Each piece has a sculptural presence, shaping the mood of a room through material, texture, shadow, and glow.

Much of Amica’s character comes from the contrast between its materials. Earth-toned ceramic bases give the pieces weight and grounding, while the paper forms bring softness, translucency, and movement. The ceramic surfaces are ridged, irregular, and slightly imperfect, giving them a handmade quality. Set against them, the paper elements feel light and delicate, glowing gently when illuminated and revealing the craft behind every fold, wrap, and curve.

Designer: Christopher Merchant and Kawabi

The collection takes inspiration from natural and familiar forms rather than strict geometry. Pods, fans, lanterns, vessels, and ceremonial objects seem to echo through the work. These references make the lights feel approachable, almost recognizable, but still unusual enough to hold attention. They sit somewhere between functional objects and quiet domestic sculptures.

A few pieces from the larger collection show this language especially clearly. The Standing Legume Lamp is one of the more playful examples. Inspired by the curves of leguminous pods, it stacks two illuminated modules vertically above an offering tray. The form feels like a small gesture toward food, harvest, and ritual. It has a simple presence, but the reference gives it warmth and personality. Rather than reading as a conventional lamp, it feels closer to a small domestic monument.

The Relic I Lamp moves in a more poetic direction. It reimagines the folding fan as a light sculpture, with pleated paper opening out in sweeping arcs. Held upright by a totem-like wood base and anchored by a cast concrete block, the piece captures the feeling of motion paused mid-gesture. There is a sense of air, shadow, and light moving through it, even while the object remains completely still.

The Legume Pendant Horizontal, Double continues the collection’s organic vocabulary. Inspired by strung beans, it turns pod-like curves into a suspended paper illumination system. Its modular structure gives the form flexibility, while the handmade details keep it grounded in craft. Regionally sourced Japanese kozo paper, Shaker-style bentwood caps, and hand-hammered nails bring a sense of material honesty to the piece.

The Souvenir Sconce offers a quieter but equally expressive moment. Mounted to the wall, it shows the undulating paper form from one of its most graceful angles. The construction is minimal, but the silhouette is soft and full of movement. It celebrates pleated lantern craftsmanship with restraint, making a bold statement in a gentle voice.

These works are only a portion of the broader Amica collection. Across its many forms, the collection continues to explore the same relationships between ceramic weight, paper softness, organic silhouettes, and careful detailing. The pieces feel connected, but not repetitive. Each one has its own proportion, gesture, and mood.

What makes Amica compelling is the way it balances opposites: heavy and light, earthy and translucent, structured and organic. The pieces do more than brighten a space. They change how the space feels. Even when unlit, they hold their own as objects with texture, rhythm, and presence.

Amica feels contemporary without losing its connection to older craft traditions. Paper, ceramic, wood, and concrete are used in a way that feels both familiar and fresh. The collection invites slower looking, asking the viewer to notice the ridges, folds, shadows, and small handmade details that give each piece its character.

At its core, Amica is a collection about softness with structure. It turns natural references and crafted processes into luminous objects that feel intimate, expressive, and quietly theatrical.

The post The Amica Collection Finds Poetry in Paper, Clay, and Glow first appeared on Yanko Design.