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.
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.
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.
A mermaid-themed computer in a thrifted clamshell purse. 32 million TikTok views. The cyberdeck scene just discovered what happens when someone brings taste.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The thesis behind Gentle Future. Five design principles for the shift from tools that do more to objects that know when to stop.