Designers of Tomorrow 2026: My brother visited Apple’s Paris showcase and met designer Yoonjeong Lee

My daily experience with art is limited to watching a reel or two from ByMuseum, so when Apple unveiled its 2026 Designers of Tomorrow showcase in Paris, you wouldn’t have expected me to pitch a story to my head of content, let alone ask my younger brother to visit the venue for exclusive coverage. But here I am, with a collection of photographs and videos and, to my surprise, a short interview with Seoul-based designer Yoonjeong Lee.

For anyone else whose art intake comes in vertical video, here’s the short version. Apple and Design Miami brought Designers of Tomorrow back inside Hôtel de Maisons and handed the designers a brief called presence, meaning objects you have to slow down for. My brother was in the city anyway and spent part of his trip in that room with his iPhone out.

The interview was a happy accident. He was bent over a lectern covered in paper and worn pencils when the woman who built it started talking to him, and her blunt take on Apple’s part in all of it is the reason my story exists.

Apple picks, designers make: Yoonjeong Lee’s take

One of the most important parts of this exhibition is showing how Apple’s products and technology come together with each artist’s creative process and ideas.

“Apple chose four designers. And four designers are doing their own work,” Lee told my brother. The shared brief was presence (“this year we have a theme, like design for presence,” as she put it), and from there each designer went off to think and make something different, before she wrapped it up in four words. “That is Apple’s role.”

I like Lee’s answer more than anything in Apple’s press release. The Cupertino company goes on at length about how the iPhone, iPad, and Mac fit into each designer’s workflow, while curator Rodman Primack calls Apple products a common thread running through their work. Lee described a company that makes the selections and then gets out of the way.

About 5,000 veneer sheets and three pencil stubs

Lee’s piece is called New Form. Three worn-down pencils pin a thick stack of paper to the top of a wooden lectern, doing a job left to nails, and under each pencil a light glows through the sheets. The paper is the lampshade.

Then there’s the base. Lee stacked about 5,000 thin sheets of veneer to build it, from four woods according to the placard, and in my brother’s close-ups the layers show as fine stripes running up each column like the edge of a shut book. Gluing thousands of sheets of bendable wood, one on top of the other, until they reach the height of a lectern and form stripes that run straight from floor to paper, takes a level of patience I can only admire from a long way off.

One of his clips shows an older visitor reaching across the paper to fuss with a pencil, and nobody in the shot treats it as off limits. A tin of colored pencil stubs also waits on the plinth next to the piece, and my guess is it’s the raw material, leftovers before they get promoted to nails. The placard doesn’t say. Treat that one as my reading.

What I love is the joke at the center of New Form. A pencil you’d throw in the bin is holding a lamp together.

Isabel Rower’s chair wants to be heard

Padded Chair 1860 got more of my brother’s camera roll than anything else in the room, and I get why. From across the room the seat and back look like black leather. They’re paper pulp composite under a high-gloss glaze, and a heavy curtain of ceramic beads hangs from the seat, each one streaked gray like cheap marble done well.

Rower says the beads make a sound when brushed, and she wants that noise to make sitting down “a mindful encounter.” He got his hand right up to one strand for a photo. Nobody’s sitting in it, mind you, since it’s up on a plinth. For someone whose art feed tops out at a reel a day, a chair that makes noise is an easy sell.

The process video looping on the iPad beside the chair is my favorite detail. It shows Rower’s hand placing unglazed beads striped in purple and rust on a pink work surface, nowhere near the dark gray they end up. At a 46 cm seat height it’s an ordinary chair by the numbers, and nothing else about it is ordinary.

A palm-frond lantern and a steel box hiding a chess table

Salem S. Charabi’s The Emergence of Light looked like a plain paper floor lamp in my brother’s photos. It isn’t plain at all, with a veil of banana paper over a frame of stacked date palm fronds on limestone. Charabi says each frond strand is an octagon in profile, just 3 millimeters wide and split by hand.

Parafernalia’s MonoAmbiente 1 does the opposite trick. Closed, its acid-etched stainless steel skin forms a whole landscape. Open, as it was during his visit, it gives you mustard-yellow stools and a table with a chessboard laid out, a setup for two people to talk or play. Genki Matsumura and Sebastián Zorrilla run the studio between Monterrey and Mexico City, and the piece is a pretty good argument for meeting someone face to face.

Where the iPhone and iPad come in

The Apple hardware in the room was modest. My brother’s footage shows iPads on white stands, each one looping a designer at work, and that’s about it.

Lee sketches on iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, but the part she values is the hand-off between devices. “It’s how my devices connect to each other that makes them, and all their flexible features, truly useful,” she told Apple. There’s a nice irony in a designer who draws with Apple Pencil making a lamp that’s held together by the wooden kind, and I doubt it’s lost on her.

Matsumura gets the line I’d put on a poster. “Our studio is iCloud,” he says, since he and Zorrilla don’t share a physical desk and trade sketches over Messages and FaceTime instead. Rower leans on iPhone to document her process and Keynote to set images against text.

Year two for Designers of Tomorrow

The showcase opened on October 20, 2026, marking the second year of Apple and Design Miami’s collaboration. Rodman Primack, Design Miami’s longtime former creative director, curated the exhibition, while a jury that included Apple’s Molly Anderson selected the designers. Primack says the theme of presence grew out of a recognition that everyone’s lives have become busy.