The sixth edition of ICFF’s Emerging Designers Spotlight Online is here. We’re excited to feature the emerging talent discovered through ICFF’s global network, whose creative voices are shaping the future of contemporary design.
Presented in partnership with CLEVER, this online editorial series offers emerging designers a platform for sustained media exposure and industry visibility. In our latest feature, we spotlight three designers whose practices are rooted in a thoughtful dialogue between material, culture, and craft. From exploring natural materials and artisanal processes to reinterpreting cultural narratives through contemporary design and creating objects that invite deeper reflection, each approaches making as both a creative and philosophical pursuit. Together, their work demonstrates how a new generation of designers is shaping a more intentional future for design; one that values authenticity, experimentation, and meaningful connections between people, objects, and place.
If you’d like the chance to be featured in the next Emerging Designers Spotlight, apply HERE!
(Image above courtesy of Juba Concepts)
What inspires you as a young designer?
I find myself inspired by artisanal processes that stand the test of time and reflect a harmonious relationship between humanity and environment.
What are you working on right now?
I will spend the summer fabricating a new sculptural object: Club Chair 01. This object blends the quintessential club chair typology with my aesthetic and material values (all natural materials). This chair will be the first in an edition of six, each in a unique colorway, and will serve as a medium to research all natural upholstery alternatives.
What is a specific project you would like to share?
I’ve just presented the Midnight Collection at Wanted Design 2026. This collection of new objects leans into the next iteration of the grid language and celebrates a newly discovered source of cosmic black, natural pigment.
What do you hope to contribute to the world?
One more unique perspective to be considered.
Discover more of Samuel Aguirre’s work: Website & Instagram.
What inspires you as a young designer?
I am inspired by the stories hidden within objects. Growing up in India, I was surrounded by rich traditions, crafts, philosophies, and ways of living, yet I often felt that many contemporary products borrowed their identity from elsewhere. Design became my way of exploring where culture, material, and modern life can meet. What drives me is the possibility of creating objects that feel meaningful beyond their function. I am interested in translating heritage into forms that belong to the present rather than replicating the past. Every project becomes an opportunity to ask how design can preserve memory, spark conversation, and create emotional connections between people and the objects they live with.
What are you working on right now?
Bespoke Marble Furniture.
What is a specific project you would like to share?
Moh Maaya is a contemporary chess set inspired by Indian modernism, spirituality, and the idea of illusion and attachment reflected in the Sanskrit term “Moh Maya.” Rather than designing a conventional chess board, we reimagined the game as a layered landscape. Different elevations across the board symbolize hierarchy, power, and the journey of the pieces, transforming each move into a physical and narrative experience. The project draws inspiration from the architectural legacy of Indian modernists such as B.V. Doshi and Louis Kahn while exploring how traditional philosophies can be expressed through contemporary form. My dream is for Moh Maaya to demonstrate that Indian design can tell globally relevant stories without relying on literal cultural motifs, creating a new language that is both rooted and forward-looking.
What do you hope to contribute to the world?
I hope to contribute a more thoughtful and culturally connected approach to design. In a world where products often feel disposable and disconnected from their origins, I want to create objects that carry meaning, celebrate craftsmanship, and encourage people to engage more deeply with the things they own. Through my work, I hope to show that design can be a bridge between tradition and innovation, helping preserve cultural narratives while creating relevance for future generations.
Discover more of Vidushi Gupta’s work: Website & Instagram.
What inspires you as a young designer?
I’m driven by the search for optimism in the built environment. Design is one of the few places where you can actually practice optimism, where you can take a position on what it means to live well in this moment rather than reaching backward for it. I think a lot about finding a sense of place in our time, and how objects can help anchor that. The micro carries the macro, and materiality is where I find it most clearly. Grain, texture, machine marks, the way light interacts with a material. These kinds of small physical facts always point us to something much larger about where we are. Underneath all of it is a belief that making things is its own form of meaning. The act of creating something original, whatever it may be, is an act gratitude toward the universe. Beauty in our humanity comes from that impulse to make, and I try my best to participate in it honestly.
What are you working on right now?
I am working on expanding my line of lamps and luminaires as well as some fun smaller objects for the home, all under the Juba studio banner.
What is a specific project you would like to share?
TL-1, pictured above.
What do you hope to contribute to the world?
I want to make objects for dreamers. Things that ask you to slow down, that don’t pretend to have all the answers, and that leave room for whatever the person living with them brings to the encounter. So much of what surrounds us now is meant to be immediately legible and to demand a quick response. I’m more interested in the opposite, in objects that reveal themselves over time and reward a longer kind of attention. A hands-on relationship to manufacturing matters to me for similar reasons. When you’re physically taking part in material transformation, the object carries a record of that contact, and I think people can feel the difference, even if they can’t name it. It’s also one of the only honest ways to take responsibility for what you put into the world. I’d like Juba’s contribution to be a small argument that beauty, restraint, and care for the planet aren’t competing values.
Discover more of Nick Trudel’s work: Website & Instagram.
