Apple's Designers of Tomorrow 2026 Brings Rattling Beads to Paris

A chair edged with roughly 1,500 handmade ceramic beads rattles softly when someone brushes against it. That piece, alongside a lantern woven from Egyptian date palm fronds, anchors Apple's Designers of Tomorrow 2026, the second edition of the exhibition organized with Design Miami and curated by Rodman Primack. The show runs at the Hôtel de Maisons during Paris Design Week 2026, then through Design Miami Paris from October 21st to 25th.

This year's theme, Design for Presence, asks how furniture and objects can hold attention through physical interaction. The four selected practices come from Egypt, Denmark, the United States, South Korea and Mexico, and each starts from something marginal. As Design Miami president and jury member Jennifer Roberts observes, the designers begin with 'something small and easily missed' and build an entire language around it.

What does the lantern look like?

Egyptian-Danish architect Salem S. Charabi looks to humanity's earliest gathering places — fire — for his fixture, The Emergence of Light. The lantern stands on a grooved limestone base sourced from Egypt's Galala Mountains. Above it, slender date palm frond lengths support a veil of translucent banana paper, combining Egyptian materials, traditional palm-fiber craft and Japanese papermaking techniques. Each palm strand is worked into an octagonal section just three millimeters wide, split and drilled by hand before its sharpened ends are fitted together. Charabi modeled the connections and geometry on a MacBook Pro before fabrication. Jury member Nifemi Marcus-Bello describes the work as having 'great honesty and balance.'

How does a chair make sound?

Brooklyn-based Isabel Rower revisits a nineteenth-century boudoir chair she photographed years earlier at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Her Padded Chair 1860 is a glossy black piece with an exaggerated silhouette. Rower collected discarded furniture from the curb near her studio, reassembled it into a wooden armature, then developed the body with papier-mâché and a pulp composite made partly from shredded waste paper. The original textile fringe is replaced with approximately 1,500 ceramic beads that sway and make a gentle sound when touched. French interior designer and jury member Marion Mailaender calls the work 'a true conversation piece.'

Can a pencil stub become furniture?

Seoul-based Yoonjeong Lee starts smaller still. In New Form, three pencil stubs worn almost to their end serve as nails, holding sheets of paper above a wooden table with an integrated lamp. The table itself is built from approximately 5,000 thin sheets of veneer, stacked one by one into a substantial wooden volume; the paper above diffuses the lamp's light. Lee developed the work using iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. 'Yoonjeong has an impossibly patient way of working,' observes furniture designer and juror Minjae Kim, pointing to her attention to the smallest element.

What hides inside a steel landscape?

Mexican studio Parafernalia, founded by Genki Matsumura and Sebastián Zorrilla, takes an architectural approach with MonoAmbiente 1. The piece begins as a sculptural landscape of acid-etched stainless steel. As it opens, elements of that terrain transform into a table and two stools — a setting where two people can sit across from one another and play chess. Korean ceramic artist and jury member Hun Chung Lee suggests the etched pattern can be read as 'a psychological map.' Matsumura and Zorrilla, who work between Monterrey and Mexico City, shared sketches through iPad Pro and FaceTime to build a piece designed for face-to-face interaction.

Across all four commissions, technology runs through the design process — 3D modeling, visual archives, digital sketches — while the finished works deliver their payoff through physical qualities. SFMOMA curator and jury member Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher says the selected works invite a 'one-on-one encounter to notice detail.' Whether that up-close register draws Paris Design Week visitors into longer engagement is the show's working hypothesis, on view through October 25th, 2026.