What’s Happening: Intended to foster design ideas that improve the human condition, this year’s accolade goes to a jacket concept that captures water droplets in hyper-arid fog deserts and converts them into drinking water.

The Download: Few drier places exist than Chile’s Atacama Desert, a 1,000-mile-long strip of land wedged between the Pacific Coast and the Andes. Some of the desert’s far-flung regions receive less than an inch of annual rainfall, meaning animal and plant life rely on fog drip from the sea breeze to supply the moisture needed to sustain life. (The fog lends the arid region an otherworldly appearance, drawing comparisons to Martian terrain—Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets even filmed there.)

Scientists have tested out mesh nanofiber screens that capture precious droplets from sea air and convert them into drinking water since the 1960s, but a new prototype is taking these experiments to the next level. Instead of stationary screens, Swedish designer Pavel Hedström incorporated the mesh material into the fabric of a jacket called Fog-X that allows travelers to produce water as they walk. The mesh captures fog droplets, then gravity pulls them through a channel and into an integrated “bladder” that stores water. Fog-X can also be converted into a shelter, shielding travelers from one of the Atacama’s other main threats: harsh sunlight.

Hedström, who hails from Copenhagen and studied Architecture and Extreme Environments at the Royal Danish Academy, received the coveted Lexus Design Award for Fog-X. The accolade nurtures emerging talent by offering a platform to showcase prototypes intended to better the human condition.

A panel of professionals selects a group of finalists from thousands of entries, offering them mentorship, funding, and support to realize their ideas, as well as visibility with an exhibition during Milan Design Week. Previous winners include Lisa Marks’ custom 3-D modeled bras tailored to breast cancer survivors who’ve undergone mastectomies and BellTower’s program that uses open-source planning to provide access to clean water resources in developing countries.

Thanks to the award’s mentorship, Hedström is developing a mobile app that helps users locate foggy areas using GPS. While Fog-X helps address water scarcity, Hedström acknowledges that more work remains to make the concept—whose estimated retail price hovers around $440—more accessible for the world’s most vulnerable groups. Until then, he’s exploring how the material can be applied onto smaller, low-cost devices.

In Their Own Words: “The jacket itself is not the solution for water scarcity,” he told Dezeen, “but it shows a direction we could go down. And maybe for people like you and me, having the jacket on would change our minds about how we interact with existing ecosystems and how we approach natural resources. This takes it further than just being a jacket—it’s a vision of how we can engage with nature and build new types of infrastructures with as low impact on the environment as possible.”

Surface Says: Who knew sucking things from the air would be the next frontier of innovation?

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As the pandemic surged and lockdown took hold, Tim Simpson and Sarah van Gameren were missing their community and collaborators. In particular, the founders of the experimental London studio Glithero felt deprived of those epiphanic “a-ha” moments that ensue during the process of making, which they’ve come to cherish more than the object itself. “We’ve always been drawn to the unique moment that an object comes into being,” the duo says, “but we never displayed how much we value togetherness in this moment of alchemy.”

So for the duo’s latest exhibition of one-of-a-kind thrown pots, they handed it back to their collaborators. Quite literally: Each pot was treated with photosensitive chemicals and, one by one, visitors carefully entered a pitch-black room and held the vessels high above their heads like a trophy, rotating 360 degrees beneath an intense beam of light. As they turned, silhouettes of their hands imprinted on the surface. Focusing on their collaborators—and immortalizing many a maker’s hand—proved enlightening. “When we succeeded in making technically difficult pieces,” they say, “it felt like a group effort and we could share the moment of victory.”

One hundred of the pots are on view at London’s Gallery Fumi until June 24—as is a wall of photographs of friends and collaborators who participated, pots in hand. Besides serving as an emblem of the many hands required to make something, “it might be read as a comment on the longevity of our humanity and our wish to want to sustain,” the duo says. “It’s important to observe and reflect the sensitivities of this time. We’ve tried to bottle the essence and bring it to our audience in the shape of these vessels and objects.” The most important takeaway? Community is at their fingertips.

Designing Delicious is produced in partnership with Dorsia, a members-only platform with access to reservations at the most in-demand restaurants in New York, Miami, and L.A.

Anthony Mangieri is pizza royalty. For nearly 30 years, the master pizzaiolo has been turning out pies that flirt with perfection at Una Pizza Napoletana, his nomadic restaurant whose roots stretch back to New Jersey. These days you can find him on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where crowds grapple for a seat inside his Jordana Maisie–designed parlor adorned in tomato cans and artwork from friends, yearning to get their hands on one of his wholly original pies.

San Marzano tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, and fresh mozzarella form a harmonious trinity, while the dough undergoes a 48-hour fermentation waltz. The Marinara is a favorite (pair it with anchovies). The Cosacca is exquisitely austere with just tomato sauce, sea salt, olive oil, basil, and Pecorino Romano on the finish. Mangieri calls the Margarita “wonderful” and “the benchmark on being able to tell if a place really knows how to handle the ingredients in the dough and if the baking is done properly.” There’s also a weekly specialty pie like the Tony Baloney, a fiery alliance of pepperoni, long hots, and Parmigiano Reggiano. “Everything we do here is with restraint and an understated elegance,” Mangieri says. As the time-tested adage goes—there is beauty in simplicity.

After honing their design chops and learning the value of user experience during stints at a real estate development firm and co-working company, Nicko Elliott and Ksenia Kagner ventured out on their own to launch Civilian. The five-year-old practice has established itself as one of Brooklyn’s go-to firms for light-hearted interiors with a sense of individuality—an approach that also informs Civilian Objects, their online shop for versatile homewares. The work-and-life partners recently wrapped their most ambitious project yet, interiors for Newlab at Michigan Central in Detroit’s renovated Book Depository building.

Last week, In Common With toasted its fifth anniversary with a festive cocktail that brought together New York’s tight-knit design community. The lighting studio was fresh off celebrating an installation of its Flora Collection—a collaboration with Sophie Lou Jacobsen—at Milan’s Palinurobar, which Surface named a Fuorisalone must-see. Their elegant pendants and sconces grace the Post Company–designed interior of Raf’s, the Nolita restaurant helmed by the owners of the nearby Musket Room. Guests sipped negronis before being serenaded by a surprise performance by West Dakota, who dazzled the crowd to an Ella Fitzgerald number.

When was it? May 4

Where was it? Raf’s, New York

Who was there? Athena Calderone, Colin King, Oliver Haslegrave, Danny Kaplan, Anna Karlin, Eric Petschek, Xavier Donnelly, and more.

The Puerto Rican painter and computer engineer allows his two spheres of practice to inform one another, yielding intricately gridded canvases that both reveal and shed a soft light on the entanglements of man and machine.

Here, we ask an artist to frame the essential details behind one of their latest works.

Bio: Ricardo Cabret, 37, Queens.

Title of work: Un Nuevo Manglar (A New Mangrove), 2023.

Where to see it: Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, until June 17.

Three words to describe it: Layered, cryptic, ethereal.

What was on your mind at the time: The development of systems of infrastructure, which tend to happen in isolated ways, rather than dealing systemically with the needs of a place or a community, and without a sense of globality. You can see that in this painting, where there are concentrations of grids in certain areas, while others remain completely ungridded, almost as if they were neglected or ignored.

Dead ends aren’t the aptest metaphor for a museum seeking to instill wonder and curiosity in the minds of those traversing its halls. So when Studio Gang was tapped to conceive a contemporary addition to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, one of the city’s most beloved cultural touchstones long afflicted with poor circulation and wayfinding, forming new connections with dead ends was key.

But that seems like a minor detail within the larger scheme of the stellar Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, which officially opened last week. The long-awaited unveiling takes place nearly ten years after AMNH announced $325 million plans for Gilder to open in 2019, the museum’s 150th anniversary. Delays plagued the project—the budget swelled to $465 million as construction costs surged, and neighbors raised legal challenges. The museum triumphed, and now New York has received a breathtaking monument to science and discovery that’s sure to captivate generations of visitors.

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