DesignStation

Cauny, founded in 1946, asked Tadao Ando to design a watch. What came back was a lugless case with a domed crystal, no numerals, no seconds hand, and a single white leaf where the hour markers would be. Green is the apple. Grey is the concrete he built a career on. The first sketch, in green marker on a napkin, is in the brand’s archive. It runs a Swiss parts quartz movement, sapphire crystal with inner anti-reflective coating, Italian leather strap, 37.5mm or 31.5mm. Cauny is sponsoring the Design is Human Awards 2026.

Biomega is a Copenhagen bicycle company founded in 1998, with bikes held in museum design collections and a history of guest designers including Marc Newson. The BER is a Class 1 pedal-assist commuter designed by co-founder Jens Martin Skibsted. It weighs 37.5 lb with the battery fitted, uses a Gates Carbon Drive belt rather than a chain, and hides its motor and battery inside the frame. The argument is that an e-bike should still read as a bicycle.

Illuminations represents European and American contemporary lighting brands, among them Vibia, Terzani, Contardi, BuzziSpace and Stickbulb, and sells to interior designers and architects as much as to homeowners. The business sits on the specification side of the industry rather than retail display, which makes its thirty-five years of A&D relationships the thing worth paying attention to.

An artist and furniture designer, born in Los Angeles in 1991 and based in Atlanta. His work is built from black planes, right angles and repetition, using mass, symmetry and cantilever to hold space. The pieces sit between sculpture and function, deliberately unresolved as either art or design. In a festival context that matters: this is the exhibitor who tests whether the audience reads objects as furniture or as work, and the only one on the list whose output is not made for a client brief.

Modular systems for the home built around structure, clarity and long-term use. Its steel shelving works in three parts: a hangtrack fixed horizontally into studs, vertical standards that hook onto it without screws through the uprights, and shelves on cantilevered brackets that carry load back into the standards rather than into single anchor points. Every component comes off and goes back on elsewhere, so a shelf added this year does not fix the wall layout for the next one. Powder-coated steel throughout, rated to 165 lb per bracket pair.

In the world of advanced computer technology what does interaction mean? Human interaction? Intelligence? The timeline of progression amongst our society’s evolution raises thought to these questions also in what is our impact? As we have seen to move beyond our question of what is our purpose is on earth. Given our self assigned purposes we must ask also the simplest of questions: what is bad for us and what is good? Read more

Atlanta calls itself the City in the Forest, and the canopy that earns the name also flattens it: a mass of green read as backdrop rather than as individual living things. The series inverts the old idiom, pulling single trees out of the background blur and treating them as distinct characters holding their ground against asphalt, steel and power lines. The claim underneath it is that the city's real architecture is rooted in soil.

The curriculum runs design, engineering, technology and business together, built on a sequenced studio structure rather than a portfolio year, with graduate work concentrated in healthcare innovation, interactive product design and service design. The school sits in the College of Design alongside Architecture, Music and Building Construction. For a design festival, this is the pipeline that supplies Atlanta's product and consumer-goods studios, which are otherwise thinly represented in the city's design conversation.

An undergraduate capstone studio, led by Bryce Truitt, treating architecture as a tactical rather than a strategic practice. The studio takes Duchamp's ready-made, an ordinary object reclassified as art, and tests whether the same logic works at the scale of buildings and infrastructure: altering what already exists instead of replacing it. The site is the Georgia Tech campus, shaped by a creek that once ran through it and now survives as buried water and sewer pipe. Eight student teams propose interventions that surface that suppressed system.

The only public institution in Georgia offering a NAAB-accredited five-year professional Bachelor of Architecture, based on the Marietta campus and housed in the College of Architecture and Construction Management. The degree runs a ten-semester studio sequence ending in a fifth-year thesis treated as design research. The department has a track record of public work in the city, including the Urban Blanket installation in Midtown.