What If Your Lamp Had a Heartbeat?

Artist Sabrina Merayo Nuñez showed "The Incubator" at SHINE, a lighting exhibition curated by Harry Allen for NYCxDESIGN 2026 at The Seaport in Manhattan. Her piece sat among 70 works from designers and studios worldwide. Cool Hunting called it one of the most talked-about entries in the show.

Nuñez grows her own material. She developed a 100% biodegradable bioplastic from algae and collagen, using a recipe inspired by medieval paint and varnish techniques. The amber-colored sheets get wrapped around branches and roots, embedded with lenses, crystals, bark chips, and electronic sensors. Her broader Sympoietic series responds to proximity: approach one and it brightens, step back and it dims, stand still and it pulses. The material itself looks like petrified tree resin, the kind that preserved biological artifacts thousands of years ago. Every element is grown, not manufactured. The Microbiome lamps even contain tiny glass spheres filled with agar and roots, housing live microorganisms that slowly alter the sculpture's appearance over time.

What happens when the object that lights your room was once alive itself? Nuñez's work sits at a border that most product design refuses to approach: the place where furniture starts behaving like an organism. How many other household objects are waiting for someone to ask whether they should breathe?