Hiroshi Ishii's Tangible Media Group is building communication channels with the dead. Not AI chatbots. Antique objects that hold the physical traces of people who once touched them.
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.
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.
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.
The thesis behind Gentle Future. Five design principles for the shift from tools that do more to objects that know when to stop.