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After MouthPad, Augmental unveils Vox, a privacy-focused wearable mic that lets you whisper-to-type

The most interesting interface ideas often begin where conventional gadgets start to fail. Voice assistants want you to speak up, microphones capture the whole room, and public dictation still feels awkward in the age of AI. Augmental’s latest product, Vox, approaches that problem from a very different angle, placing a speech interface on the chest where it can listen closely to the wearer and stay nearly invisible under a shirt.

When Augmental introduced MouthPad, it showed how assistive technology could evolve into something far more refined than a visible workaround. The in-mouth interface gave users hands-free cursor control through a custom dental form factor, and now together, MouthPad and Vox begin to outline a new computing language built around the body. One handles navigation through subtle tongue gestures, the other captures quiet speech for dictation and commands, recreating the familiar logic of mouse and keyboard in a wearable, deeply personal form.

Designer: Augmental

Tomás Vega sat down with Yanko Design to show us Vox, but he started by talking about the success of MouthPad. Over a hundred users now rely on it for daily computing, with some logging up to 16 hours of use in a single day. One user, he mentioned, started her undergraduate degree with the device and is now finishing her studies in mathematics. Another told him how it freed him from his wheelchair-anchored setup, letting him work from the comfort of his bed. These stories ground Augmental’s work in real human impact, which makes the arrival of Vox feel like a natural next chapter.

The core problem Vox tackles is that voice technology assumes everyone has a strong, clear voice and is comfortable speaking aloud. That isn’t always true. For users with speech impediments, weakened voices, or lost lung function, standard microphones just don’t work well. Even for those who can speak clearly, privacy is a real concern; private computer access is a right everyone should have. Vox was built for these constraints, but the solution ends up having much broader appeal. It even helps people who stutter, including Tomás himself, because whispering can reduce stuttering and make voice AI more accessible.

The logic behind Vox is pretty clever, drawing inspiration from a doctor’s stethoscope. It sits against the skin under your shirt and is optimized to capture the low-volume speech that travels through your body. An acoustic horn inside the device gathers the subtle vibrations and air displacement from your skin and channels them into a super-sensitive MEMS microphone that is tuned specifically for human speech. The raw audio sounds a bit like hearing someone talk underwater, but Augmental’s signal processing cleans it up to isolate exactly what the speech-to-text model needs. Because the mic is facing your body instead of the room, it’s a personal microphone designed for you and only you.

The relationship between the two products is what makes the whole system click. As Tomás puts it, MouthPad is the mouse, and Vox is the keyboard. Together, they offer full computer control that is both private and hands-free. MouthPad handles all the navigation with tongue gestures on its trackpad, and its radial menu turns complex actions like copy-and-paste into a single, simple gesture. Vox then adds the speech layer, which can be activated with a button press or through the MouthPad itself. The idea is that you put it on in the morning and forget it’s there, always available but almost entirely invisible.

Looking at it next to the MouthPad, you can immediately see the family resemblance. Vox is a circular, transparent pendant on a simple white cord, with its internals visible enough to look engineered but not so much that it feels cold or clinical. The three colored buttons on the side, orange, black, and gray, can be remapped to do whatever you want, whether that’s firing up a specific AI agent, switching devices, or just controlling your music. The long-term vision is even more integrated, with Tomás imagining a future of “skinware” where these functions might one day live in a smart tooth or a small skin patch.

For now, Vox is launching as a beta, with the first wave limited to a few hundred units priced at $200. This is a deliberate choice to learn from early users before scaling up. The MouthPad, for comparison, is $1,400, a price that reflects the complex custom-fit process, which involves a 3D scan at one of Augmental’s hundreds of partner dental centers across the US. The Vox pendant has a battery that lasts about eight hours, with enough power for around two hours of straight transcription time, which is more than enough for a full day of dictation. You can learn more and get yours over at augmental.tech.

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The Only Thing Missing From This LEGO Coffee Set Is the Smell

LEGO fans are obsessive. Coffee fans are obsessive. Somewhere at the exact intersection of those two fandoms sits ModularManiac’s Coffee Collection, a build that exists purely because someone looked at their pour-over setup one morning and thought it deserved to be immortalized in bricks. Five separate builds, one shared obsession.

The set nails the process end to end: a gooseneck kettle mid-pour, a dripper loaded with grounds, a finished cup topped with latte art, even a coffea arabica plant growing berries nearby. Steam curls off the cup in brick form. The only thing this build can’t replicate is the smell, that first hit of fresh grounds and hot water that makes the whole ritual worth doing in the first place.

Designer: ModularManiac

Start with the pour-over, because it’s the mechanical centerpiece of the whole collection. The dripper’s pleated white filter might be the only non-lego element here, but I honestly can’t think of an alternative. It sits inside a transparent cone that shows LEGO pellet coffee grounds inside. Below it, a glass carafe holds a pool of translucent brown pieces standing in for brewed coffee. A gooseneck kettle accompanies the build, giving you exactly the right kind of hardware a coffee-nerd would expect from this build. Everything’s scaled to match each other, so you could even mimic your pouring pattern with this brickset… Yes I know you absolutely will.

A tiny cup sits on a saucer and comes with interchangeable latte art discs, built from gold and cream pieces arranged into foam-art patterns you can swap in and out depending on whether you want to mimic an espresso, a doppio, a cortado, or a macchiato. It’s a genuinely clever mechanism dressed up as a novelty, since the whole cup assembly pulls apart to let you customize the design sitting on top. Next to it, a small spoon rounds out the tabletop scene, presumably for stirring in sugar, and the coffea arabica plant stands off to the side with berries built along posable stems, giving the whole collection a quiet nod to where any of this actually comes from.

Altogether the build runs around 1,400 pieces across those five objects: kettle, pour-over, plant, spoon, and cup. None of it is enormous individually, but staged together on a shelf or a desk, it reads as a complete scene rather than five disconnected models, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.

The set has already picked up a Staff Pick badge on LEGO Ideas, the platform where fan designers submit builds like this one for the community to vote on. Cross 10,000 supporters and LEGO’s internal team reviews the project for a possible retail release. The Coffee Collection currently sits at 2,242 supporters with 590 days left to hit its first checkpoint of 5,000, so there’s time to help push it along. If your desk is missing a coffee ritual that never actually needs refilling (or if you’re a recovering caffeine addict who wants their fix without breaking their streak), you can cast your vote on the LEGO Ideas page here.

The post The Only Thing Missing From This LEGO Coffee Set Is the Smell first appeared on Yanko Design.

Morocco’s 115,000-Seat Stadium Is 30% Built and Ahead of Schedule

When Morocco and Spain co-hosted the 2030 World Cup bid announcement back in 2022, Grand Stade Hassan II was the kind of promise that sounded almost too big to keep. A 115,000-seat stadium shaped like a tent, rising from a forested site 38 kilometers north of Casablanca, designed to become the largest purpose-built football venue on the planet. You could have been forgiven for filing it under “ambitious concept” and moving on.

That filing cabinet is looking a little embarrassed right now. Nine months into active construction, Grand Stade Hassan II is approximately 30% complete, with around 40% of its tribunes already built. The team is operating across three continuous shifts a day, seven days a week, targeting full completion by the end of 2027. For a stadium of this scale, that is not a slow-burn project. That is a sprint, and by all accounts, it is on pace.

Designers: Oualalou + Choi and Populous

Morocco has committed roughly €1 billion in public funding to the project, with Phase 2 construction carrying a budget of $320 million alone. A $35.6 million earthworks package was awarded to local firm SGTM and is near completion. New highways and rail links are being built alongside the stadium to handle the infrastructure demands of 115,000 people arriving for a match. When you commit at that level, you are not hedging. You are building for a legacy.

The design itself was covered here when it was first announced, but seeing it move from render to reality changes what you’re looking at. Populous and Oualalou + Choi built the concept around the idea of arrival over access, where the experience begins well before anyone finds their seat. Gardens, shaded walkways, and vast public concourses sit beneath a continuous aluminium canopy, elevated platforms bring greenery 28 metres above ground, and the whole structure feels more like a destination than a stadium. Renders only go so far. Construction footage is different.

What’s changed since the announcement is the stakes. For a long time, the 2030 World Cup Final looked like a formality for Real Madrid’s Estadio Bernabeu. Spain co-hosting the tournament made that assumption feel almost automatic. But as Grand Stade Hassan II has moved from concept to construction with speed and seriousness, the conversation around the final has quietly shifted. Sources cited by The Athletic have noted that Casablanca is now a genuine challenger, with Morocco’s investment and its growing influence within global football making what once looked like a straightforward decision into something far more competitive.

I’ll be upfront: I want Morocco to host the final. Not because of any particular rivalry with Spain, but because the moment Grand Stade Hassan II opens, it will be unlike any stadium that has ever hosted a World Cup final. The Bernabeu is iconic. Camp Nou is historic. Grand Stade Hassan II would be something with no real comparison, a stadium built from cultural memory, designed as a gathering place rather than just an arena, and carrying with it the full weight of a country’s decades-long pursuit of this exact moment.

Morocco first proposed a major Casablanca stadium in its bid for the 2010 World Cup. Then again for 2026. Both times, the bid fell short and the stadium remained a drawing. This is the third attempt, and unlike the previous two, the cranes are actually there.

After the 2030 tournament, the stadium will become home to Raja Club Athletic, Wydad Athletic Club, and the Moroccan national team. The €1 billion investment doesn’t disappear after the closing ceremony. It stays, and it becomes the foundation for football in a country that has spent a generation proving it belongs at the top table. Whether FIFA ultimately awards Morocco the final or not, Grand Stade Hassan II is real, it is rising, and it is moving faster than almost anyone expected. Some big promises actually get kept.

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Canon scrapped its most ambitious vlogging camera ever… Here’s what the patent reveals

Canon has filed three separate patents chasing a handheld vlogging camera, five years apart, and each one solved a completely different problem than the one before it. The version everyone read about this spring is a fixed lens gimbal with a smart shutdown sequence, built to compete with the Osmo Pocket 4, and it traces cleanly back to a 2024 filing. Its real ancestor sits further back, in a December 2020 patent that rarely gets mentioned in the same breath, and it deserved better than being forgotten. That filing wasn’t a gimbal camera at all, despite early reports calling it exactly that. It was a pistol grip built around an interchangeable lens mount and a motorized head that only pans and tilts, aimed at creators who wanted a real sensor and real glass in something you could frame with one hand. Had Canon actually built it, this would have been the most ambitious vlogging camera the company ever attempted, not the fixed lens compromise it eventually shipped toward instead.

DPReview had to rewrite its own coverage once it worked through the Japanese documents, since the initial assumption of Osmo style stabilization didn’t hold up against what the patent actually claimed. Control came from a rear touchpad and a front trigger for preset framing points, with the display flipping automatically depending on lens orientation. Canon even filed a follow up patent for a lock to stop the lens twisting free mid motion, evidence of how much engineering went into a product that never left the drawing board. The mount in the drawings lines up with EF-M, a system Canon has since confirmed is finished, lenses gone and shipments halted for good. Comparing that abandoned idea to this year’s fixed lens gimbal makes one thing obvious, Canon already had its most ambitious vlogging camera worked out on paper years ago, and simply never pulled the trigger.

A 360 degree pan and roughly 270 degrees of tilt let the lens swing from a landscape shot to a selfie without repositioning the grip. A rear touchpad aimed the head, a front trigger locked preset framing points, and two buttons handled recording and playback. The camera also read its own orientation, flipping the display when the lens rotated backward and switching to vertical when the grip turned ninety degrees. A hot shoe up top took a mic or a light. None of it needed a phone paired over Bluetooth, unlike most gimbal cameras built since.

Patent application 2021-004930 would have added a lock to stop the lens releasing by accident, since a lens on a motorized head has nothing solid to brace against while you twist it free. CanonNews and DPReview both read the mount as EF-M based on the tab position in the drawings, backed by a separate filing for an add on grip and adapter meant for larger lenses. Canon’s own documents admit the tradeoff, since a bigger adapted lens would have limited the head’s pan and tilt range, while a compact EF-M prime would have kept full motion. It is a rare case of a patent documenting its own compromise instead of pretending the idea scales cleanly. EF-M is gone now, with Canon USA confirming shipments in the region have ended, so this camera never got the chance to grow into a second generation of lenses.

Canon’s April patent takes the opposite bet, a fixed lens gimbal with a folding head and a shutdown sequence smart enough to know when nobody is holding it. That is a sensible answer to the Osmo Pocket 4, though a smaller idea than the one Canon shelved earlier, since a fixed lens will never accept a wider prime the way an EF-M mount could have. Canon spent five years learning that practicality sells better than ambition, and this year’s patent proves the lesson stuck. Somewhere in Tokyo sits the version of this camera that would have actually mattered to people who own lenses, and Canon decided it was too complicated to build. Whatever ships next will be more reliable than the 2021 concept, but it will also be the safer camera, worth remembering next time Canon calls something a first for creators.

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Bell & Ross BR-03 Helipad gives iconic square watch a helipad dial with a spinning helicopter

A watchmaker who cannot have enough of aviation inspiration has launched a recognizable silhouette with a display that never stands still. Meet BR-03 Helipad, the latest Bell & Ross Flight Instrument timepiece that replaces the traditional hands on the dial with a helicopter hovering over a helipad. The only thing missing is the “whomp-whomp.”

Yes, that’s for real! For some it may be a surprise. But for the Bell & Ross community, it’s another iteration of the interesting BR-03 Horizon, which itself pushed aviation-inspired horology to the next level. Designed again to make you green in envy, the Bell & Ross BR-03 Helipad “is especially extraordinary,” the company says. While it wears a very reminiscent set of features including an identical square-shaped case and those four screws on the four corners, the BR-03 Helipad is a different league altogether.

Designer: Bell & Ross

A horological interpretation that pays homage to the oft-overlooked part of aviation, the helicopter, the BR-03 Helipad is way beyond the aircraft cockpit dashboard instruments that most of the watch displays in the brand’s Flight Instrument series are inspired by. While each model in the series released before this has faithfully translated the aesthetic codes of the flight cockpit, this one puts an entire functional helicopter motif on a helipad-esque dial.

The new BR-03 Helipad, powered by an automatic BR-CAL.327 movement with a 54-hour power reserve, does follow the same DNA of the Flight Instrument series, but adds a new dimension to it, which is equally immersive and distinctive. To that accord, the Bell & Ross BR-03 Helipad is a limited-edition pilot’s watch priced at $4,800. Limited to just 500 pieces worldwide, the watch features a 41 mm case made from micro-blasted black ceramic, which keeps the timepiece lightweight and makes it durable.

The case is only 10.6 mm thick, packing a distinct dial under its sapphire crystal complete with an antireflective coating. The dial, as mentioned earlier, is styled after a helipad with a white “H” marker in the center. A helicopter can be seen hovering over the helipad, which sits inside a rotating disc with the hours marked on a yellow circle inside the chapter ring. The minutes are indicated by the rotating helicopter fuselage, while the spinning blades denote the seconds.

The hour markers and the yellow helipad outline coated with Super-LumiNova, for clear night visibility, mimic the nighttime landing scene on the dial. The BR-03 Helipad is water-resistant up to 100 meters, and comes with two interchangeable straps. One is a yellow rubber strap that matches the visual aesthetics of the watch, while the other is made from black synthetic fabric. The black ceramic caseback is pretty modest, it’s only etched with the details of the watch.

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When Paper Does the Heavy Lifting: Sunology’s Storey Packaging

Most of us don’t give packaging a second thought. It arrives, we tear it open, and it goes straight into the recycling bin or, less nobly, the bin under the sink we keep telling ourselves we’ll sort through on a weekend. But every once in a while, a piece of packaging stops you mid-unbox and makes you think: someone really cared about this.

The Storey Battery by French solar tech company Sunology is a compact home energy storage unit, the kind that quietly stores power from your solar panels or the grid and releases it back when you need it most. It can run household appliances through an outage, reduce your electricity costs, and help you step a little further away from grid dependency. Plug-and-play clean energy, designed for the person who cares about both good design and their electricity bill. Swedish industrial design firm Propeller Design handled both the product and its packaging, and if you’ve seen the Storey itself, you already know this is a studio that doesn’t phone things in. The battery has soft, clean forms and an aluminum housing that belongs in a living room, not buried in a utility closet. It also won the BIG SEE Grand Prix 2026 Design Award, which feels entirely deserved.

Designer: Propeller Design

But the packaging is what I want to talk about, because the packaging is quietly extraordinary. The Storey weighs 30.5 kilograms. That’s serious weight for anything to withstand during shipping and freight, and for decades the default answer to that kind of engineering challenge has been foam, plastic, more foam, and maybe some more plastic just to be safe. Propeller went a completely different direction. The entire solution is fiber-based. No plastic. Not even a little bit.

They built the structure around strong honeycomb board, paperboard corner reinforcements, and paper straps. If you’ve ever seen honeycomb board in cross-section, you’ll know it’s deceptively capable. The cellular geometry distributes weight in a way that makes it genuinely strong, the kind of structural work that plastic foam has been quietly getting credit for all this time. The paper straps wrap around the battery unit like a considered branding detail rather than an afterthought, and one of them comes tagged with a small kraft card that reads “Reuse me!” alongside a clean line illustration of a cable. It’s a small gesture, but it signals the right values without making a speech about it.

I think what Propeller understood here, and what a lot of packaging designers still miss, is that sustainable materials don’t have to mean a downgraded experience. There’s a quiet assumption embedded in a lot of eco-friendly packaging that you’re trading aesthetics for ethics, that paper means compromise. This design challenges that directly. The unboxing feels deliberate and considered. The honeycomb cradles the Storey like it was made for it, because it was. The yellow straps against the pale, soft form of the battery are almost gift-like in appearance. It’s the kind of opening experience that justifies being filmed, which, in 2026, is not a small thing to say about any piece of industrial packaging.

The industry conversation around plastic-free packaging has been going strong for years, but execution still tends to lag behind intention. Companies announce pledges and deliver on them for products where plastic-free engineering is relatively manageable. Designing out plastic on a 30.5-kilogram product that needs to survive freight conditions across a global supply chain is an entirely different engineering problem, and Propeller actually solved it rather than simply worked around it.

The Storey battery is built for a future where home energy storage becomes a normal part of domestic life. It follows that its packaging should feel like it belongs in that same forward-thinking vision. Paper strong enough to carry 30 kilograms of clean energy technology is not a small design win. It’s a proof of concept, and one that the rest of the industry probably needs to study closely.

The post When Paper Does the Heavy Lifting: Sunology’s Storey Packaging first appeared on Yanko Design.

The $9,000 Lounge Chair That Spent 20 Years Becoming a Workspace

Lounge seating hasn’t changed much in the past half century. The category has largely coasted on the same formula: a cushioned shell, a recline mechanism, and a vague gesture toward comfort. Meanwhile, the way people actually use chairs has shifted dramatically. People answer emails in living rooms, take video calls from hotels, read on tablets at reclined angles, and switch between devices constantly throughout the day. The furniture beneath them, for the most part, was never designed for any of that.

The Diffrient Lounge started as a concept over 20 years ago, and the gap it was meant to close has only grown wider since then. What distinguishes it from the lounge chairs that came before isn’t any one feature but the philosophy behind all of them together. Rather than building a comfortable chair that happens to have a few add-ons, the Diffrient Lounge was engineered from the ground up as a self-contained work and rest environment, with proprietary systems developed specifically for it rather than borrowed from existing furniture components.

Designer: Humanscale

The central mechanism, called Dynamic Comfort, allows the backrest and headrest to move in concert at the touch of a button. Motorized adjustments glide both elements smoothly between positions, keeping the spine in its natural curve and the head supported across a wide range of angles. The result is a chair that works just as well for a 30-minute focused writing session as it does for a reclined afternoon of reading, without having to compromise one for the other.

An integrated worksurface pivots into place for a laptop, tablet, or notebook and stows away when it isn’t needed, and two built-in USB-C ports handle power without requiring a nearby outlet. The upper port delivers 140W for laptops; the lower delivers 30W for phones and smaller devices. The power module is also designed to be upgradable independently of the chair itself, which is a detail worth noting at this price point. The chair is available from $8,995 and can reach upward of $15,000 in full configuration.

Materiality gets the same level of attention as the engineering. The upholstery runs across Kvadrat and Dedar textiles and alternative leathers from Ultrafabrics, while the worksurface can be specified in solid walnut, solid oak, or a low-sheen laminate. Over 352 finish combinations are available, which makes it equally suited to a residential living room, a hotel lobby, an executive office, or a wellness suite. The chair doesn’t ask those environments to adapt to it.

The technology throughout is deliberately quiet. There are no visible displays, no control interfaces beyond two levers, and nothing that announces itself as tech. The engineering, as with the best consumer hardware, disappears into the experience of sitting in the chair. A person using it for a long video call doesn’t think about the headrest angle; they just notice they aren’t uncomfortable.

It earned the iF Design Award 2026 and holds the distinction of being one of the final projects conceived by a mid-century design pioneer before his death in 2013. Humanscale spent years developing the proprietary systems that the original concept demanded, treating the project less like a furniture line and more like a device requiring its own purpose-built mechanisms. That timeline shows, and so does the result.

The post The $9,000 Lounge Chair That Spent 20 Years Becoming a Workspace first appeared on Yanko Design.

This human refrigerator chills you the in peak summer heat – anytime, anywhere

Summer temperatures are rising globally, leading to uncomfortable heatwaves even in regions where summers were earlier a pleasant affair. This has prompted manufacturers to develop innovative ways to handle heat when not in the cozy comfort of home or your vehicle. The latest trend has revolved around personal coolers like the Sony REON Pocket Pro Plus, Dyson HushJet Mini Cool, and the Aecooly Cold Air Ultra.

Please add more to the list from the Land of the Rising Sun, which has not been spared by the brutal summers this year. Thinking out of the box, Japanese refrigeration and vending machine manufacturer SDRS has collaborated with industrial equipment supplier TRUSCO Nakayama for a human refrigerator. The idea is to have a portable machine a person can walk into on a hot day.

Designer: TRUSCO Nakayama and SDRS

This one-person cooling booth, dubbed Do Hiemon Box, looks like a commercial refrigerator and is designed to provide rapid cooling when exposed to intense heat. In fact, the solution is inspired by Japan’s popular vending machines that can be found in virtually every corner of the cities. The booth maintains an ambient temperature of around 15 degrees Celsius on the inside, which is a welcome relief for anyone exposed to the peak summer Sun. To provide rapid cooling, 5 degrees Celsius chilled air is directed towards the head, neck, and shoulders. This reduces the symptoms associated with heat exhaustion within 10 minutes.

Of course, accelerated cooling after being exposed to extreme heat in a very short time frame can also be dangerous. Keeping this in mind, the cooling booth has three cooling modes and an automatic shut-off timer after 20 minutes. This helps the body adapt to the sudden temperature change, as eventually the user has to step out into the Sun again. Do Hiemon Box is intended for commercial use in places with high temperatures like factory floors, construction sites, warehouses, schools, outdoor events, or city centers. The fact that the cooling booth has caster locking wheels, runs off any standard 100-volt outlet, and uses only 0.51-kilowatt-hour power (half the electricity required by a spot AC), makes it a highly practical solution with global warming on the rise.

Measuring approximately 2 meters tall, 93 cm wide, and 1.2 meters deep, the IPX3-rated cooling booth made out of stainless-steel panels has polystyrene insulation boards for maximum cooling efficiency. Do Hiemon Box’s standard model comes at 1.5 million yen before taxes (approximately $9,200). The versions with crane eyebolts and more options like a portable power station cost extra. Operating at a cost of around 16 yen per hour (roughly $1), the cooling solution is destined to be a popular choice around the globe.

The post This human refrigerator chills you the in peak summer heat – anytime, anywhere first appeared on Yanko Design.

adidas Hyperboost Euphoria: The Foam That Outgrew the Track

Performance sneakers have a habit of making promises they can’t quite keep outside of the gym. They arrive looking like they were engineered on a space station, and the moment you wear them to brunch, you realize the rocker sole is pushing you forward like you’re perpetually late for a sprint. adidas knows this tension well, which is probably why the Hyperboost Euphoria exists.

The Euphoria is the lifestyle sibling of the Hyperboost Edge, the performance running shoe adidas dropped in March. Where the Edge was built for the track, the Euphoria is built for the life you actually live, the one that involves a lot of walking, standing, sitting in cafés, and occasionally jogging for a bus. adidas pulled the same Hyperboost cushioning technology, the pebbled supercritical foam that made the Edge genuinely exciting, and reworked everything else around it. The midsole is carved out to save weight. The stance is wider. The heel extends out. The rocker is intentionally dialed back so the shoe doesn’t feel like it’s trying to propel you somewhere you didn’t ask to go. The result is a platform that is stable and grounded in a way that actually makes sense for daily wear.

Designer: adidas

The upper is where things get interesting from a pure design standpoint. A large TPU net structure wraps the sidewalls, giving the silhouette a kind of exoskeleton quality that reads as technical without being loud about it. The semi-transparent nylon material plays against the structured cage nicely, hinting at the construction underneath. adidas also swapped out the mountain logo on the tongue for the Trefoil, a small but deliberate move that signals exactly what this shoe is: an Originals product, not a performance one. It is the kind of detail that only obsessives notice, and yet it matters.

There is an argument to be made that adidas is exceptionally good at this particular move, taking foam technology born in performance and migrating it into lifestyle. The Boost lineage did it. The 4D midsole has done it. The Hyperboost is following that same arc, and it makes sense commercially and creatively. If you develop something genuinely good, you eventually want it to live in more places.

The Euphoria has also already been spotted off the pitch on Jude Bellingham, Lionel Messi, and Pedri during the FIFA World Cup. That kind of high-profile visibility is not accidental, and it reinforces the positioning. adidas is clearly not treating this as a minor side release.

Colorway-wise, the launch lineup covers blue, black, and white, an all-black option, white and black, and a red that carries the same energy as the more expressive iterations. Bold but not chaotic, which tracks with the overall aesthetic of the shoe.

What I keep thinking about is how the sneaker market has recalibrated around comfort in a way that would have seemed overcorrected a decade ago. The chunky foam wave came, peaked, and landed somewhere permanent. Consumers who once wanted flat, minimal silhouettes are now completely comfortable in a stacked platform, and brands like adidas have gotten very good at making that stack feel intentional rather than excessive. The Hyperboost Euphoria does not feel like a compromise between performance and lifestyle. It feels like a shoe that was designed for exactly where it ended up.

Ilka Liebmann, VP of Design Footwear at adidas Originals, described it best: the shoe was created for those who embrace a sport-inspired lifestyle, people who prioritize spontaneity, comfort, and energy, and let movement lead them. That framing is a little aspirational by nature, but it is also accurate to the product. The Euphoria wears confidently. It does not demand context. You could pair it with technical trousers or track pants or denim and the shoe holds its own across all three.

adidas has made a genuinely considered thing here, and it lands at a moment when the performance-to-lifestyle pipeline feels more refined than ever.

The post adidas Hyperboost Euphoria: The Foam That Outgrew the Track first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Plywood Chair That Becomes a Castle in 2 Moves

Plywood chairs are everywhere. You’ve seen them stacked in cafes, pulled up to dining tables, photographed on every other design account you follow. They’re functional, they’re affordable, and they’re largely forgettable. So when Irish furniture designer James Murphy sat down to create one for his university final project, the logical thing would have been to make something clean and well-proportioned and move on. Instead, he made a chair that unfolds into a castle, and now I can’t stop thinking about it.

The Casul chair is a children’s seat that, in just two moves, transforms into an abstract plywood castle with battlements, shelves, and enough narrative potential to fuel an entire afternoon. In its closed form, it has the neat, compact profile of a small throne. Flip the seat panels open, fold the legs out to the sides, and suddenly you have something that looks like a doll’s house crossed with a medieval fort. The panels that held the seat become shelves. The window cutouts in the backrest align with the fortifications. The whole thing opens up the way good architecture does: logically, inevitably, like it couldn’t have been designed any other way.

Designer: James Murphy

Murphy’s path to this project is worth noting. He began as a furniture designer, then did a work placement at Lego during university and came back with a new obsession. “Designing products for children is just really fun and rewarding,” he said. His final-year brief became a mission to marry both interests, and also to address something a lot of parents quietly worry about: how to pull kids away from screens without making it feel like a punishment.

The design references he leaned on are genuinely interesting. He looked back at post-war transformable children’s furniture, particularly Hans Brockhage’s Schaukelwagen from the 1950s, a rocking chair that flips into a toy car. That piece had a real ingenuity to it, born from an era when materials were scarce and cleverness was a necessity. Murphy borrowed the spirit of it but updated the logic entirely. The castle setting was a deliberate choice: gender-neutral enough for any child, open-ended enough for any game.

The engineering behind it is more nuanced than it looks. The jigsaw joints cut into the wooden seat panel interlock to keep the chair stable during use, but release easily to form the castle’s outer walls. Specialized friction hinges hold the opened panels at whatever angle the child wants, while also preventing fingers from getting caught. Triangular buttresses at the back keep the whole structure from tipping, and the combined weight of the piece means younger kids can’t accidentally knock it over. Murphy tested a remarkable number of hinge types to get the movement right. “I didn’t even know there were that many types of hinges,” he admitted, which tells you more about the obsessive detail of the process than any portfolio description could.

Two versions exist. One is finished in chalkboard paint, so children can redecorate the castle walls as often as they like. The other hides foam swords under the seat and cushions that convert into shields, the kind of detail that makes you realize this was genuinely designed with play behavior in mind, not just aesthetics. Both discoveries came partly from play-testing with real children. A girl who kept wanting to draw all over the clean plywood prototype was the reason the chalkboard version exists. The same test sessions turned the castle into a unicorn cafe, a besieged fort, and Bowser’s Castle from Super Mario, which is probably the most useful design feedback any furniture designer has ever received.

The Casul chair has since won one of the top prizes at London’s New Designers showcase, and it deserves the recognition. Good children’s design is harder than it looks, because the standards are unforgiving. Kids don’t pretend to like things. If a toy doesn’t hold their attention, it’s on the floor in ten minutes. The fact that Murphy’s chair passed that test, across multiple children and multiple imaginary worlds, tells you everything about how well he understood the brief.

The post The Plywood Chair That Becomes a Castle in 2 Moves first appeared on Yanko Design.