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Apple Announces its Designers of Tomorrow for 2026

Apple has announced Parafernalia, Yoonjeong Lee, Salem S. Charabi and Isabel Rower as the four recipients of its "Designers of Tomorrow" award for 2026. The news was unveiled at an exhibition taking place during this year's Design Miami Paris, with new works by each of the four designers on view, each responding to the theme of "Design for Presence"."Each of the works invites you to look closer and engage in multiple senses," said juror member Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, who is a curator at SFMOMA. "Instead of spectacle, each work beckons a one-on-one encounter to notice detail. These details bring the intimate experience of the work into a moment of focus and presence."For Parafernalia, a studio made up of designers Sebastián Zorrilla and Genki Matsumura (who are based between Monterrey and Mexico City respectively) the theme made them think about conviviality of presence, noting that it is "seldom a singular condition"This manifested in MonoAmbiente 1, a multifunctional piece that explores how different forms of presence – such as a conversation, or a game of chess – can coexist within a single object.Closed, they describe the unit as a "landscape" with acid-etched stainless steel surfaces. Inside, you find stools and a table and a chess board – one set of pieces made by Matsumura, and the other by Zorrilla. Egyptian Danish architect Salem S. Charabi turned to one of the oldest ways of drawing people together. “Light is something we’re all instinctively drawn to, dating back to our earliest fires,” he said, a thought that led him to the lantern.The result is The Eminence of Light. Its veil is made from banana paper, using Japanese techniques applied to Egyptian palm, and sits over a skeleton of hand-stacked date palm fronds on a grooved limestone base. Each strand is three millimetres wide, split by hand and drilled, with ends sharpened by chisel so they interlock. Brooklyn-based Isabel Rower is interested in what happens when an everyday object is made from something people can’t immediately identify. Her Padded Chair 1860 takes its exaggerated proportions from 18th- and 19th-century papier-mâché furniture and objets d’art, setting a high-gloss finish against a fringe of ceramic beads along the seat. “The surface functions as a site for curiosity for me,” explains Rower. “People don’t always know what my pieces are made of, even as they’re touching them. It’s captivating when something that isn’t readily understood takes the form of a familiar object, like a table or teapot. It generates a kind of friction that brings you into immediate awareness of the objects we use every day.”For Seoul-based Yoonjeong Lee, the theme was a chance to bring overlooked, background objects to the fore. New Form works as both a table and a lamp: sheets of paper make up the shade, held in place by three worn-down pencils used as nails, while the base is built from around 5,000 thin sheets of stacked veneer, a nod to her signature approach of building volume through repetition. “I wanted to express this year’s theme through something small that we could all recognize — a shared experience,” Lee explains. “This story doesn’t carry some grand narrative. Instead, it takes a second look at the familiar to help you rediscover that which has been quietly forgotten.”2026 marks the second year of the initiative, which acts as a collaboration between Apple and Design Miami, in order to present emerging talent from around the world on a prominent stage. The selection process is overseen by a jury, and then the final exhibition is curated by Rodman Primack, founder of the Mexico City based collectible design gallery AGO Projects.Designers of Tomorrow is on view at Design Miami Paris, Hôtel de Maisons, 51 Rue de l’Université, 75007 Paris, from 20 October.Click here to view full gallery at Hypebeast