A chair edged with 1,500 handmade ceramic beads makes a soft, resonant rattling sound when someone brushes against it. Nearby, an intricate lantern rises from a carved limestone base, its delicate structural frame woven meticulously from Egyptian date palm fronds. These sensory-rich creations form part of four exclusive new commissions presented at Apple’s Designers of Tomorrow 2026 exhibition, organized in partnership with Design Miami and curated by Rodman Primack. Staged at the historic Hôtel de Maisons during Paris Design Week 2026, this second edition of the collaborative initiative brings together a diverse cohort of emerging international designers whose works collectively invite people to slow down and spend a little longer engaging with the physical objects surrounding them.
This year’s overarching theme, Design for Presence, examines how contemporary furniture and everyday functional objects can command our attention through tactile physical interaction. The selected design practices hail from different parts of the globe, with each studio approaching the brief through its own distinct vocabulary of materials and methods of making. As Design Miami president and jury member Jennifer Roberts observes, the participating designers begin with "something small and easily missed" and construct an entire expressive language around it. Across the exhibition space, those humble starting points range from an almost-completely-exhausted pencil stub to the familiar, comforting sound of ceramic beads knocking gently against one another.
Salem S. Charabi Builds a Lantern from Egyptian Palms and Stone
Egyptian-Danish architect Salem S. Charabi looks back to the earliest human gathering places for his striking lantern, titled The Emergence of Light. Deeply inspired by humanity’s primal attraction to fire, the sculptural fixture stands firmly on a grooved block of dense limestone sourced directly from Egypt’s Galala Mountains. Above this heavy foundation, slender lengths of date palm fronds form an intricate architectural framework supporting a translucent veil of delicate banana paper. The materials are harvested from different regions of Egypt, while the construction seamlessly marries traditional methods of working with organic palm fibers with refined Japanese papermaking techniques.
Each individual strand of palm has been meticulously worked into an octagonal section just three millimeters wide, split and drilled entirely by hand before its sharpened ends are precisely fitted together. To develop the complex geometry prior to physical fabrication, Charabi utilized a MacBook Pro to model the precise connections. There is an engaging tension established between the heavy, grounded stone base and the almost weightless structure hovering above it, where ambient light catches the overlapping fibers. Jury member Nifemi Marcus-Bello describes the work as possessing "great honesty and balance," recognizing the immense time and human touch embedded in every stage of its construction.
Isabel Rower Gives a Historic Chair a Skirt of Ceramic Beads
Brooklyn-based designer Isabel Rower revisits a nineteenth-century boudoir chair for her contribution, Padded Chair 1860, a glossy black seating piece defined by an exaggerated silhouette and a playful skirt crafted from handmade ceramic beads. Her initial inspiration stemmed from a chair she had photographed years earlier while visiting the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. To build her contemporary interpretation, Rower collected discarded furniture pieces from the curb near her studio and reassembled them to form a sturdy wooden armature. She then built up the organic body using papier-mâché and a pulp composite made partly from shredded waste paper, sealing and finishing the final surface in a high-gloss black paint.
In a clever subversion of traditional upholstery, the original chair’s classic textile fringe has been replaced with approximately 1,500 ceramic beads, which sway and emit a gentle acoustic chime whenever a visitor brushes past or sits down. It represents an unexpectedly playful use of a material that Rower has long explored, introducing a subtle element of movement to the traditionally static act of sitting. The object also recalls the elaborate, highly decorative surfaces of nineteenth-century decorative furniture, placing a strong emphasis on how those surfaces feel against the human body. French interior designer and jury member Marion Mailaender calls the work "a true conversation piece," noting how its elaborate fringe gives people a compelling reason to reach out and discover how the material behaves in real time.
Yoonjeong Lee Finds New Purpose in a Worn-Down Pencil
For Seoul-based designer Yoonjeong Lee, the starting point for creation is something considerably smaller than furniture: a standard wooden pencil worn down almost to its final end. In her project New Form, three tiny pencil stubs are repurposed as structural nails, holding sheets of paper securely in place above a solid wooden table that features an integrated lamp. Lee has long maintained a professional focus on small fittings, carefully examining the minor structural elements that typically disappear entirely into the larger objects they support. Here, the humble pencil is thrust into the role of a central detail, encouraging viewers to take a much closer look at an otherwise familiar and overlooked piece of domestic furniture.
The table itself is constructed from approximately 5,000 remarkably thin sheets of wood veneer, stacked meticulously one by one to create a substantial, solid wooden volume. This repetitive, labor-intensive construction imparts a distinctive layered visual appearance to the material, while the paper suspended above it diffuses the downward light. "Yoonjeong has an impossibly patient way of working," observes furniture designer and juror Minjae Kim, pointing to the meticulous attention the designer devotes even to the smallest structural element. Lee utilized an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil throughout her digital development process, though the completed work resonates most profoundly at the intimate scale of the tiny pencil nails holding the entire assembly together.
Parafernalia Turns Etched Steel Into Furniture for Two
Mexican design studio Parafernalia, founded by Genki Matsumura and Sebastián Zorrilla, takes a distinctly architectural approach with their piece MonoAmbiente 1. The design initially presents itself as a sculptural landscape formed from acid-etched stainless steel, its patterned surfaces suggesting an abstracted, imagined terrain. As the monolithic structure carefully unfolds and opens, elements of this metallic landscape transform dynamically into a functional table and two matching stools. What first appears to be a purely decorative object suddenly reveals itself as an intimate setting for conversation, complete with space for two people to sit comfortably across from one another and engage in a game of chess.
The stainless steel surface features its own intricate graphic language, characterized by precise etched markings that become increasingly apparent as ambient light shifts across them. Korean ceramic artist and jury member Hun Chung Lee suggests that the complex pattern can be understood as "a psychological map," inviting viewers to interpret its imagined geography for themselves. The project also mirrors the collaborative workflow of Parafernalia, which operates simultaneously between Monterrey and Mexico City. Matsumura and Zorrilla regularly share digital sketches, brainstorm ideas via iPad Pro, and coordinate through FaceTime and other modern tools before bringing their remote collaboration together into a singular piece of furniture designed specifically for face-to-face human interaction.
The Physical Side of Digital Design
Across all four unique commissions, technology plays a supporting role throughout the preliminary design process, ranging from Charabi’s precise 3D modeling and Rower’s digital visual archives to Lee’s detailed tablet sketches. Apple’s ongoing involvement naturally infuses the exhibition with a specific emphasis on the hardware and software tools driving contemporary creative practice. Still, the finished pieces ultimately captivate audiences through their undeniable physical and sensory qualities. A ceramic fringe produces an unexpected acoustic resonance, a folded metal landscape transforms into a place for communal seating, and a discarded pencil finds a second lease on life long after its original utilitarian purpose has been exhausted.
For SFMOMA curator and jury member Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, the selected works successfully invite a "one-on-one encounter to notice detail." That core philosophy becomes immediately apparent in the perceptible difference between viewing these objects from across a crowded room and approaching them up close. As visitors draw nearer, the thoughtfulness of their construction gradually becomes legible, revealing the countless small decisions and human interventions behind each finished form.
The Designers of Tomorrow 2026 exhibition remains on view at the Hôtel de Maisons during Design Miami Paris, running from October 21st through October 25th, 2026.
