Deep Dive
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.
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.
Jun 3, 2026
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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.
Jun 3, 2026
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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.
May 31, 2026
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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.
May 28, 2026
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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.
May 25, 2026
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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.
May 22, 2026
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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.
May 18, 2026
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"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.
May 16, 2026
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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.
May 16, 2026
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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.
May 11, 2026
#tiktok.com
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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.
May 10, 2026
#github.com
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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.
May 10, 2026
#ecal.ch
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