Life-Sized Animals Carved From Single Blocks of Camphor Wood, Inside a Theater That Has Never Shown Sculpture
Atsuhiko Misawa and Koji Tanada share KAAT's first-ever sculpture show, carving deer and children from single blocks of camphor wood. The technique is older than most countries. The argument is current.
The Barbican Just Filled Its Brutalist Sculpture Court With a 24-Meter Pavilion of Clay, Hay, and Spice
Delcy Morelos hand-built an earthen pavilion the length of a basketball court inside the Barbican's concrete Sculpture Court. The walls are clay, hay, and antifungal spice, made to live and breathe through the summer.
An E-Reader Shaped Like an Actual Book
Two e-ink screens, a hinge, and six centuries of book design. Diptyx is an open-source reader that closes like a codex and needs no account, no cloud, no case.
A 120-Year-Old Silversmith Made a Sterling Silver Yo-Yo. The Dents Are the Point.
Sterling silver yo-yos, stone dice, a toad-shaped ring toss. Georg Jensen's new games collection treats dents and scratches as proof of life, not damage.
A $5 ESP32 Brings Dead Bose Speakers Back to Life
Bose killed the cloud. A $5 ESP32 stick called SixBack brings the preset buttons back by pretending to be the server. The speaker never knows the difference.
A Solar-Powered E-Ink Navigator That Just Points You Home
A solar-powered, e-ink GPS compass that does exactly one thing: points you home. No app, no cell signal, no charger. Built with a XIAO ESP32-C6 and published as open hardware.
A $5 ESP32 Stick Just Replaced Bose's Entire Cloud
A developer put an entire fake Bose cloud on a $5 ESP32 stick. Your SoundTouch speaker can't tell the difference.
TrailNAV Points You Home With Sunlight and Silence
A solar-powered e-ink navigator built on an ESP32. It points you home and runs for days. No signal, no charger, no map app.
The iPod Shuffle Is Being Advertised in the New York Subway. The Tagline: 'Zero Screen Time.'
Back Market is running iPod Shuffle subway ads. TechCrunch just gave the friction-as-feature movement a name. The shift from maximum functionality to maximum well-being now has a market category.
An E-Reader That Opens Like a Book, Because It Is One
Two e-ink screens, a hinge, and zero cloud dependencies. Diptyx built an open-source reader shaped like the thing it replaced.
A Speaker That Knows Where You Are, and Whispers
At Columbia's 2026 MFA thesis show, an artist from the Iyarhe Nakoda Nation lists "my ancestor's stories" as a material, equal to wood and ribbon. The room fills with sound that knows where you are sitting, and refuses to be louder than that.
Good Night Light: CW&T at SHINE
Cooper Hewitt award winners Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy made a bedside lamp for SHINE, the seventy-designer lighting survey curated by Harry Allen. When calm-tech makers turn to the bedroom, the bedroom changes.
A Watch With One Needle, and the Patience to Read It
A Raspberry Pi inside, a lab voltmeter outside, and a single needle that swings to tell you the hour. The cost of one needle is patience. Maybe that is the feature.
A Tiny Desk Tank Where Every Fish Has Its Own Mind
A $15 ESP32 dev board, a cheap yellow display, and a piece of code where every fish has its own personality. The result lives on your desk and lets you tap to feed it.
Sugimoto Designed His Own Singapore Show as a Mandala, and Put 14 of His Fossils in It
The artist designed the gallery layout himself, as a circular mandala mirroring the Five Elements. Then he set 14 fossils from his personal collection inside it.
The D20 That Remembers Every Bad Roll
A maker has shipped a PCB die that tracks streaks, develops moods, and quietly nudges future results to amplify your luck or your suffering. Each one has its own personality.
The Six-Year-Old Laptop That Boots Into Vim and Stays There
A six-year-old System76 Galago Pro with the desktop OS wiped, replaced by a black tty that boots straight into vim. Network-manager exists only so files can sync when there's signal. The rest of the time, the laptop just writes.
The 6.5-Meter Sculpture You Play by Hopping on a See-Saw
A 6.5-meter tangle of horns and spinning mobiles sits in a Sydney walkway, and the only way to make it sing is with your body. Two see-saws and a row of faders turn whoever walks past into the orchestra.
Bose Killed the Cloud. A $5 Chip Pretends to Be It.
When Bose pulled the plug on SoundTouch, six preset buttons went dark across thousands of speakers. One maker's $5 ESP32 quietly impersonates the dead service, and the speaker is none the wiser.
Diptyx: An Open-Source E-Reader That Folds Shut Like a Book
Most e-readers chase more: color, touch, a storefront in your pocket. This one ships with the WiFi switched off and the full schematics promised to anyone who asks.
The Week of the Single Pointer
A wristwatch with one needle, a desk gauge with one needle, a PCB die with one state machine. Plus: CW&T at SHINE, RISD treats consumer objects as religious artifacts, and CHU goes silent in 24 days.
The Geometry Was Already in the Stone: Javier Riera's Light Work on Customs House
Spanish artist Javier Riera spends months shaping geometries pulled from shells and honeycombs, then projects them onto a Sydney landmark until the stone seems to reveal a pattern it was hiding all along. Light handled as a tool for noticing, at the scale of a building.
TrailNAV — A Navigator That Points You Home and Never Runs Out
A solar-assisted e-ink trail navigator with no cellular radio. It does not show you a map. It points toward home, and keeps pointing for days with no signal and no charger.
SixBack — A $5 Chip That Brings Back What Bose Switched Off
Bose shut down the SoundTouch cloud and bricked the preset buttons on speakers people paid up to $1,500 for. A ~$5 ESP32 stick speaks the dead protocol and brings them back.
Yamaha Took the Word “Herringbone” Literally. The Amp Grille Is a Fish.
Designer Koji Notomi went to a fish market, bought a herring, and dissected it by hand. The skeleton became the grille of a Yamaha amp, and the etymology of a pattern you have seen a thousand times suddenly snaps into focus.
Hermès Turned Its Tokyo Gallery Into a Club for the Dead. It Closes Sunday.
Andrius Arutiunian's 'Obol' stages a futuristic afterlife in bitumen, silver coins, and synthetic choir, drawing on Greek funeral rites and underground rave aesthetics in equal measure. Five days left to catch the strangest argument for ritual technology in Tokyo this spring.
A Map of the East Bay Where the Roads Are Copper and the Dots Are Family
A wall-hung circuit board where every street is a copper trace and every glowing dot is a person you love. Jonathan turned his family's whereabouts into furniture.
A Butterfly That Flaps With Your Pulse, And Slows When You Do
Calm-tech rendered as a small unhurried toy instead of a wellness device. The pulse drives the wings, the wings teach you to slow the pulse, and the loop is the whole medicine.
A Speaker That Forgot It Was a Speaker
Devon Turnbull's OJAS and Karimoku built a Sound House in Tokyo where speakers are machined from oak and listening rooms follow tea ceremony. When you can't tell where the room ends and the speaker begins.
"Calm" Is Dead. Good.
Samsung built an entire Milan Design Week exhibition around emotion and never once said "calm." The label has died. What replaced it is more interesting.
They Made a Tamagotchi That Can't Die. Did They Also Kill the Point?
Sweekar is a $100 AI companion with warmth simulation, breathing rhythms, and an unkillable mode at Level 51. But the original Tamagotchi worked because yours could die.
Her Cyberdeck Lives in a Vintage Purse. 32 Million People Watched.
A mermaid-themed computer in a thrifted clamshell purse. 32 million TikTok views. The cyberdeck scene just discovered what happens when someone brings taste.
This PCB Has a Mood Engine. When It Gets Angry, It Takes Down Your WiFi.
A custom PCB virtual pet that feeds on WiFi signals and deauths your network when it gets angry. Open-source firmware with feelings baked into the board.
ECAL Students Showing Work Inside an Underground Water Tank
For the Mapping Festival, ECAL filled a disused Geneva cistern with 360-degree immersive projections. The most interesting design school work is happening inside infrastructure nobody was supposed to see.
A Desk Robot That Gets Sad When You Leave
An ESP32 weather display with a face, a mood, and the ability to notice when you leave. Open-source, pocket-sized, and more emotionally honest than most consumer electronics.
Kutarq Studio's Totem de Luz — A Pulley Where Your Dimmer Used to Be
No app. No dimmer. Pull a counterweight and the onyx glows. Kutarq Studio replaces electronic controls with sailboat hardware and the weight of your hand.
Quantum Jungle — Robin Baumgarten's Installation Turns Physics into Something You Pet
A wall of 1,000 touch-sensitive metal springs running Schrödinger's equation in real time. Robin Baumgarten made quantum physics feel like tall grass.
Toward Maximum Well-being
The thesis behind Gentle Future. Five design principles for the shift from tools that do more to objects that know when to stop.