Apple and Design Miami Are Back with Designers of Tomorrow — and This Year the Theme Is Presence

Apple and Design Miami are back for a second year with Designers of Tomorrow, and the theme they handed four emerging designers is one that feels genuinely urgent: presence. What still holds attention in a world that has made distraction the default?

The four designers selected by a global jury each answered that question through a different material logic. Salem S. Charabi, an Egyptian Danish architect, built a lantern from banana paper and date palm fronds using Japanese methods applied to Egyptian materials, a piece that suspends both light and attention through the same structural tension. Isabel Rower, based in Brooklyn, created Padded Chair 1860, a high-gloss chair with ceramic beaded fringe that makes a sound when brushed, turning the unconscious act of sitting into something you notice. Yoonjeong Lee from Seoul stacked roughly 5,000 sheets of veneer to build a wooden table and lamp base, with worn-down pencils repurposed as nails holding paper lampshades in place. And Parafernalia, the Monterrey-to-Mexico City studio of Genki Matsumura and Sebastian Zorrilla, created MonoAmbiente 1, an acid-etched stainless steel piece that closes into a landscape and opens into a table and stools for two.

The exhibition opened at Hotel de Maisons in Paris and travels to Design Miami in December, where it will be part of the broader Miami Art Week programming. Curator Rodman Primack, former longtime creative director of Design Miami, shaped the theme around an honest recognition of how busy modern life has become, and the designers responded with objects that slow things down.

Design Miami runs December 3-7, 2026. More at designmiami.com.