"Design Week is one of the rare moments when many of the city's private courtyards are open to visitors, especially in Cinque Vie, a historical neighborhood of artisans where many real Milanese families still have their palaces."
Craft is often defined as skill in making things by hand, but this interpretation is being challenged by AI. Craft transcends physical interaction; historical figures like Mozart and Beethoven exemplify mastery without traditional methods.
Bergs Potter takes the cake for me, closely followed by the majolica-like planters at Williams-Sonoma and a few stylish designs from Ferm Living and Pottery Barn. These planters lean home decor over plastic planters, making them weather-resistant, durable pieces even on a wind-whipped balcony or hurricane-sacked home garden.
Glass demands immediacy. Working at temperatures above 2,000°F leaves little room for overthinking, so the process becomes a kind of live dialogue between material, colour and chance. That same immediacy informs what I'm drawn to as a collector: works that carry a decisive gesture, a tactile presence, and the feeling that they could only exist in one form.
Rather than representing a simple return to the past, this renewed interest reflects a broader reconsideration of how architecture engages with materials, local resources, and environmental conditions.
The contemporary technology museum has emerged as a performative participant in the systems it seeks to document. The architecture of these institutions has become increasingly fluid and bold, often mirroring the velocity and complexity of the systems it houses. They operate as mediators between the human, the ecological, and the technological realms, transforming from encyclopedic warehouses into active educational engines.
Unlike plastic, which can warp at high temperatures, Feldspar porcelain retains its shape and color over time, making these pieces a timeless investment. The use of Feldspar porcelain in the manufacturing of this dishware is what makes it worth buying. Feldspar is often added to ceramics, alongside quartz and clay, to make the material stronger.
The advertising industry has always been in the business of making things, such as the OOH billboard, the 30-second spot, the snappy social post, the standard website: final, finite assets polished and pushed into the world. Agencies were paid, often by the hour, for producing final versions of these things and then moved on to the next project. Even with generative AI entering the picture, much of the conversation remains focused on making those same things faster or cheaper.
Each piece begins with used coffee pods collected from my community, materials that were never meant to last beyond a single use. Before any design work begins, the pods must be cleaned, sanitized, flattened, cut, folded, and shaped entirely by hand. They arrive dented, stained, and inconsistent, carrying the marks of their previous life. Learning how to work with those imperfections, rather than erasing them, was one of my first challenges.
Double Fine has been on a tear with its smaller projects lately. The popular indie game developer is following up last year's atmospheric adventure game with a new title in a totally different direction. As its Double Fine founder Tim Schaefer attempted to say five times fast during today's Xbox Developer Direct, is an "online multiplayer pottery party brawler" that boasts exactly the sort of colorful, clever fun that fans have come to expect from the studio.
In order to create a unique visual language for the single, Julia embarked on a three-month-long project of handcrafting and painting 300 individual ceramic tiles to make up the music video frames, each with their own beautiful irregularities and imperfections in glaze. Structured in grids of twelve, these tiles were swapped out like puzzle pieces in the final stop motion, using zoetropes and evolving motifs to follow "the meditative rhythm of the song through repetition, noise, and texture", the artist says.
But once food has carbonized and bonded to metal, the issue is mechanical, and you need something to physically break the residue apart. Eggshells are mostly composed of calcium carbonate, the same mineral found in chalk and limestone - you've probably encountered it in your toothpaste, too. When crushed into a powder, these shells become a mild abrasive, which can gently sand down the grime.
It is not about reproducing the past but about engaging in dialogue with it. We apply the same level of care and rigor to all pieces. Many of our utilitarian pieces have a strong sculptural quality, and several of the more artistic works originate from everyday forms and functions. We do not establish rigid boundaries between these categories; all are part of the same vision.
Tons upon tons of these single-use plastics end up in landfills or even floating in the ocean. Spanish design firm PET Lamp set out give another purpose to these otherwise short-lived materials. Partnering with artisans in communities from Chile to Ethiopia to Australia, the company celebrates both Indigeneity and sustainability, drawing upon time-honored global craft traditions while supporting local economies and recycling discarded materials.
Tattoos and fermentation rarely appear in the same conversation, yet across the world, they share a quiet kinship. Both are practices of transformation, crafts that reshape raw material over time through care and relationships to the land, the spiritual, and the community. Tattooing inscribes identity and ancestry onto skin, while fermentation preserves, nourishes, and binds communities through shared taste and ritual. Both create change, brewing something more than themselves through embodied knowledge passed between generations.
Kulhads, also known as terracotta mud cups, once defined the everyday ritual of tea at railway stations across India. Used briefly and discarded soon after, they accumulated along tracks and coastlines, leaving a quiet record of consumption. For this pavilion, more than 18,000 of these cups were gathered from local communities in Dharavi and reused as a building material with structural purpose.
When was the last time you saw an ashtray filled with stubbed-out Marlboros at a friend's apartment? At a restaurant? For some of us, the answer may very well be "never." Maybe that's the charm of the International Museum of Dinnerware Design's new exhibition on ashtrays - invoking an era before health codes and Mayor Bloomberg. Or reaching back even further, when you might see a Similac-branded ashtray in the office of your OB/GYN.
