Paris – October 21, 2026 -- Apple's second Designers of Tomorrow exhibition, created with Design Miami, opens today at Hôtel de Maisons in Paris, showing four original works built around the theme of presence.
Curator Rodman Primack, former longtime creative director of Design Miami, says the theme grew out of how busy modern life has become. The featured designers are Salem S. Charabi, Isabel Rower, Yoonjeong Lee, and the studio Parafernalia, run by Genki Matsumura and Sebastián Zorrilla. A jury of global design voices, including Apple's Molly Anderson, picked them for storytelling, material innovation, and craft.
Charabi builds a lantern from banana paper and date palm fronds
Egyptian Danish architect Salem S. Charabi made The Eminence of Light, a lantern with a veil of banana paper. He applied Japanese methods to Egyptian palms. Its skeleton is stacked date palm fronds, each strand octagonal in profile, 3 millimeters wide, split by hand and drilled. The base is limestone. Charabi sketched and did all the 3D modeling on his MacBook Pro.
Rower turns sitting down into a sound-driven moment
Brooklyn-based Isabel Rower's Padded Chair 1860 draws on 18th- and 19th-century papier-mâché furniture. Its high-gloss finish contrasts with a seat lined in beaded fringe. The ceramic beads make a sound when brushed. Rower uses iPhone to document her process, AirPods Pro for music, MacBook Pro for her visual archive, and Keynote to pair images with text.
Lee stacks 5,000 veneer sheets to make a pencil-nail lamp
Seoul-based Yoonjeong Lee's New Form shows three worn-down pencils reused as nails. The base works as both a wooden table and a lamp, with paper sheets as the lampshade. Lee stacked roughly 5,000 thin sheets of veneer to build the base. She sketches on iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, and relies on iCloud, AirDrop, and Notes to keep her workflow connected.
Parafernalia's steel piece opens from landscape to stools and a table
The studio spans Monterrey and Mexico City. Its MonoAmbiente 1 has an acid-etched stainless steel surface that forms a vast landscape when closed. Expanded, it reveals stools and a table where two people can talk, play chess, or share a drink. The duo trade sketches and track progress in real time on iPhone and iPad Pro, using Messages, FaceTime, and Procreate. "Our studio is iCloud," Matsumura says.