DesignWanted

Maja Rowecka, a design graduate from Warsaw, has created the startup Greenspire, offering a kit to cultivate the world’s most nutrient-dense algae at home. Spirulina is one of the oldest organisms on the planet, a cyanobacterium that has existed for roughly 3.5 billion years, long before there were fish, insects, or land plants to compete with it. However, today it is mostly sold as an expensive wellness supplement.

Patrizio Cionfoli, SVP & Chief Design Officer at Havells India, on leading a 50-person design team across five brands, designing for a billion-person market, and why local relevance is the most reliable path to global impact. There are career moves that make immediate sense on paper, and there are those that raise an eyebrow before revealing their logic.

Around 80 exhibitors, a new format, two hands-on workshops, and a new itinerary – the eighth edition of Naples’ design fair is its most elaborate yet. From the 9th to the 11th of October 2026, EDIT Napoli returns to La Santissima for its eighth edition. The venue is the monumental complex of the Santissima Trinità delle Monache, perched above the Spanish quarters, where the fair moved in 2025.

The São Paulo studio creates an office building where nature and the landscape become part of the working environment – for informal meetings or moments of exchange between teams – encouraging new ways of experiencing the space. Generally, when we talk about offices, the spaces we consider are indoor environments where greenery has the function of improving comfort and perceived quality.

There’s no shortage of design and innovation events on the calendar, but MIT Future Fest is doing something genuinely different: instead of building a trade show around MIT, it’s opening the university itself to the public. For five days, the labs, workshops, and theaters that normally exist behind institutional walls become part of a single, campus-wide experience, with over 100 participants moving between conversations, installations, tours, and performances.

From accessories to vests, the Dutch brand has been developing technologies for body temperature management since 2011. Its expertise in the field has extended to professional sports, with advanced cooling solutions developed in collaboration with adidas. Today more than ever, solutions for cooling our bodies are becoming increasingly important in everyday life.

Born from Daan van Rooijen’s personal experience, the solution, designed by surfers for surfers, aims to promote a new culture of safety in surfing, not only with the product itself but also through social impact initiatives. “Safety First” is a universal expression that we have all heard at least once in our lives, however, when it comes to certain sports, safety culture is still not considered a fundamental aspect.

Few objects seem to capture today’s design discourse better than folding chairs. Alongside bending, modular systems and the disappearance of clear distinctions between indoor and outdoor furniture, they reflect a broader interest in the nomadic aspect of our lives – one that resonates with architects, designers and those working across the discipline – as they are shaped by changing spaces, new habits and ways of living, but also by larger phenomena such as wars and the climate crisis.

In this episode of Behind, DesignWanted visits Spagnulo & Partners, a Milan-based studio specialising in architecture and interior design, particularly within the hospitality sector. Through a conversation with founder Federico Spagnulo, the episode explores a practice shaped by research, cultural awareness and the belief that architecture gains value when aesthetic quality and functionality are supported by meaningful content.

How the latest Google Home Speaker tries to prove that a mass-produced gadget can be engineered, wrapped, and eventually discarded more responsibly. The Google Home Speaker, introduced in June 2026, doesn’t look so different from the smart speakers that have been sitting on nightstands and kitchen counters for the better part of a decade. It’s a rounded, fabric-wrapped puck about the size of a large orange, available in a muted green among other colours, designed to disappear into a room.