MAGAZINE
“The Circle”: What the New Material of the Design World Looks Like
A dress grown from its own root system. A car that folds itself smaller to move through a crowded city. A machine that pulls drinking water out of the air. An eight-meter wooden whale shark, suspended mid-swim in a gallery. These are not props from a speculative film – they are exhibits, and this September they will fill five spaces inside Design Museum Holon.
“The Circle,” opening to the public on September 10, 2026, is the museum’s new large-scale exhibition, and its ambition is bigger than any single object inside it: it asks whether design – the discipline that helped build the world we now have to live with – can also be the discipline that helps us build a different one. Moving between design, nature and technology, the exhibition invites visitors to imagine what our homes, cities and everyday lives might look like in the future and rethink the ways we produce, build, consume and live, treating nature as a co-designer and a source of knowledge, inspiration and innovation.
City Transformer – CT1 TLV – Courtesy of the company
The exhibition, curated by Talia Yanover and Lior Harmoni, with Nivi Lahavi as assistant curator, spans five exhibition spaces and brings together dozens of projects from the fields of fashion, industrial design, architecture, visual communication and interactive design. Alongside creators from Israel and abroad, new works created in collaboration with the Technion, the Weizmann Institute and Shenkar will also be on view.
The idea at the heart of the exhibition is that design can be a force that offers repair, healing and flourishing. But rather than leaving the idea at the level of a statement, the works turn it into something you can see and touch: a material that grows instead of being manufactured, a garment created from a root system, architecture that starts from earth, and an installation that changes according to the body of whoever enters it.
The Dress That Doesn't Start With Fabric
In Zena Holloway’s work Rootfull, root systems become a material from which garments can be created. Instead of starting with existing textile, Holloway works with the growth process itself as part of the design process. The result blurs the line between garment, living material and design object.
Alongside it, “Living Patterns” by Tamara Efrat and Shaul Cohen will be shown, in which bacteria are not merely raw material but active participants in the work: they grow and change together with the patterns defined for them. Here, the designer no longer fully controls the final result, but works with a living system that keeps changing.
Stella McCartney is also taking part in the exhibition with S-Wave Sport, her sneaker collection for Fall 2025, developed in collaboration with the company Balena.
The innovation here isn’t only in the look or performance of the shoe, but in how the material itself was designed. Unlike regular sneakers, the materials in the new shoe can break down under industrial composting conditions. In other words, the design process already accounts for what will happen to the shoe after it has finished its job.
Alongside McCartney, textiles and dyes based on algae by Algaeing will also be on view. It is another example of how the fashion world is now searching for raw materials outside the traditional arsenal of cotton, leather and polyester.
Earth Goes Into a 3D Printer
In the lower gallery, “Orchard” by Ofer Assaf and the Technion’s MTRL Lab will be presented – an architectural pavilion 3D-printed from earth. The project connects one of the oldest building materials in existence with contemporary digital production tools, and incorporates habitats for birds and other animals into the structure itself.
Instead of technology necessarily leading to a more artificial material, here it actually enables a return to a local material and a new way of working with it. This is one of the ideas that recurs throughout the exhibition: innovation isn’t always found in inventing a futuristic material, but sometimes in a new way of using a material we’ve known for thousands of years.
Sunlight Without the Sun
Next to it, “Komorebi” by Studio Nir Meiri will be presented – a large kinetic light installation simulating the experience of sunlight filtering through tree foliage. This may be one of the projects that best illustrates the connection the exhibition tries to make between nature and technology: not imitating a tree as an object, but trying to recreate the feeling it produces – light, movement and change.
When Your Pulse Enters the Exhibition
In the Margalit Gallery, Olga Stadnyuk’s Pulse Now will be shown, an interactive installation for a single participant. The visitor places their palm on a sensor that measures their heart rate in real time, and the system links this data to solar radiation intensity and the Schumann resonance. The encounter between them is translated into a dynamic projection and sound environment.
In this case, the material of the work is no longer just wood, fabric or polymer but the visitor’s own body. Every person who enters produces a slightly different version of the installation, according to the data collected at that moment.
And this may also be what connects the different works in “The Circle”: the boundaries of design are expanding. A root can become a garment, a bacterium a creative partner, earth a material for digital printing, and a human pulse part of an installation. Instead of only asking what an object should look like, the exhibition asks what it can be made of, how it can come into being, and what new experiences can be designed through it.
On the cover – Yulia Smilansky – Beauty as a Byproduct – Photo by the artist
“The Circle – Design as a Tool for Changing Reality” at Design Museum Holon
Opening: September 10, 2026
Curators: Talia Yanover and Lior Harmoni
Assistant Curator: Nivi Lahavi
Professional Advisor: Yair Engel
