Apple has unveiled the 2026 Designers of Tomorrow, the second edition of its emerging-designer showcase with Design Miami. The exhibition opened on October 20 at Hôtel de Maisons in Paris, and this year’s theme is presence.
Apple named the four designers an announcement. They are Salem S. Charabi, Isabel Rower, Yoonjeong Lee, and the studio Parafernalia, which Genki Matsumura and Sebastián Zorrilla run. Each made one original piece for the show.
Rodman Primack, the former longtime creative director of Design Miami, curated the exhibition. He says the theme came from an honest recognition of how busy daily life has become, so every piece is built to hold attention.
The four pieces use everyday materials to make people stop and look
Charabi, an Egyptian Danish architect, built a lantern called The Eminence of Light. The veil is banana paper made with Japanese methods, and the frame is date palm fronds split by hand to 3 millimeters wide. The limestone base keeps the grooves of its own formation.
Rower, based in Brooklyn, made Padded Chair 1860, which draws on 18th and 19th century papier-mâché furniture. It has a high-gloss finish and a beaded fringe along the seat. The ceramic beads make a sound when brushed, so sitting down becomes something you notice.
Lee, based in Seoul, built New Form, a wooden table and lamp where worn-down pencils stand in for nails. She stacked roughly 5,000 thin sheets of veneer to make the base, and paper sheets form the lampshade.
Parafernalia, which works between Monterrey and Mexico City, made MonoAmbiente 1 from acid-etched stainless steel. It looks like a vast landscape when closed and opens into stools and a table where two people can play chess or share a drink.
Every designer used MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, or iPhone to build their piece
Charabi did all of the sketching and 3D modeling for The Eminence of Light on a MacBook Pro. The other three spread their work across several Apple devices and apps.
- Rower uses iPhone to capture ideas, AirPods Pro for music, MacBook Pro for a personal visual archive, and Keynote to pair images with text.
- Lee sketches on an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, and relies on iCloud, AirDrop, and Notes to move work between her devices.
- Parafernalia trades sketches on iPhone and iPad Pro, and uses Messages, FaceTime, and Procreate to stay in sync across two cities.
Matsumura explains how the two founders collaborate without a shared workspace, “We don’t share a physical desk. Our studio is iCloud.”
A nine-member jury picked the four designers for their storytelling, material innovation, and craft. Apple’s Molly Anderson was one of the nine.
Our Take
What stands out is how little of the show is about the devices. The MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and iPhone stay in the background as working tools, which is a smart place for Apple to be in a design showcase. It follows Apple’s Sydney Opera House projection of iPad art in March, and it arrives while John Ternus is reportedly acting as Apple’s design chief himself.
