Smart Glasses Run Hot. A 1mm Fan Might Finally Fix That.

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Smart glasses have a problem they don’t talk about enough, and it has nothing to do with design or battery life or social awkwardness. It’s heat. Plain, boring, uncomfortable heat. When you pack AI processing, computer vision, translation capabilities, and high-resolution displays into a frame that sits directly on your face, things get warm fast. Not warm in a “this laptop is on my lap” kind of way, but warm in a “I need to take these off because my temple is burning” kind of way. It’s a limitation that has quietly held the entire category back, and it’s one of the reasons smart glasses have struggled to make good on years of very loud promises.

xMEMS Labs is trying to fix that with the XMC-1200, and the approach is genuinely clever. The XMC-1200 is a solid-state micro fan, billed as the world’s smallest active micro fan purpose-built for AR, XR, and AI-powered smart glasses. It measures just 46mm², it’s 1mm thin, and it draws only 70mW of power. For context, that is less energy than most Bluetooth earbuds consume. Yet it still manages to deliver up to a 10°C temperature reduction at a 1W thermal load, which is not a small number when you’re dealing with wearable tech that people expect to use comfortably for hours at a time.

Designer: xMEMS

What makes the XMC-1200 different from conventional cooling solutions is that it’s built for the exact spaces those solutions can’t reach. Traditional fans simply don’t fit inside a glasses temple arm. The XMC-1200 does. Paired with xMEMS’ Astra2 drive ASIC, the chip targets heat directly at the source rather than trying to dissipate it passively. It also carries an IP68 rating, meaning it holds up against water and dust, which matters a great deal for something you’re wearing on a humid afternoon or during a light rain.

The timing here is significant. We’re at a point where the smart glasses category is starting to feel real in a way it hasn’t before. Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses have sold surprisingly well. Apple continues iterating on Vision Pro. Startups and established brands alike are betting big on the idea that the next dominant computing interface lives on your face. But all of that progress runs into the same wall: you can miniaturize a processor, you can shrink a display, but you can’t compress the laws of thermodynamics. Heat is still heat.

That’s what makes xMEMS’ announcement feel more foundational than it might appear at first glance. This isn’t a headline feature. Nobody is going to choose smart glasses because of the cooling chip inside them. But they will absolutely notice when their glasses throttle performance after 20 minutes of use, or when the frame gets too hot to wear during a long session, or when the display dims because the hardware is desperately trying to regulate its own temperature. These are the friction points that kill user adoption quietly, before anyone stops to ask why.

The XMC-1200 won’t be the last word in wearable thermal management, but it represents a genuinely meaningful step toward smart glasses that actually behave like the always-on, AI-powered tools they’re marketed as. Engineers working on next-generation devices now have an option that doesn’t force them to choose between ambitious performance and a form factor people will actually want to wear.

Engineering samples are currently available under NDA for qualified OEMs and technology partners, which means this is still early. Consumers won’t be picking XMC-1200-equipped glasses off a shelf anytime soon. But the fact that a purpose-built cooling solution at this scale exists at all is a signal that the industry is finally treating thermal management as a design priority, not just a footnote in a spec sheet. Good design has always been about solving the problems nobody sees. The XMC-1200 is exactly that. Invisible, necessary, and quietly important to everything the smart glasses category is trying to become.

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Artefilo Makes Home Objects From Elephant Grass and Hospital Cabinets

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The sustainable home goods market has a specific credibility problem. Products marketed as eco-conscious often get there through incremental adjustments, reducing a percentage of virgin plastic, switching to a recyclable box, or sourcing from a slightly shorter supply chain. The result is a kind of sustainability theater that satisfies certification requirements without fundamentally changing either what objects are made from or how they find their way into a home.

Artefilo approaches that question differently. Based in Edam in the Netherlands, the independent design atelier makes contemporary home objects from materials most manufacturers wouldn’t consider: elephant grass combined with recycled plastic, reclaimed wood fibres, brick dust, and salvaged hospital cabinetry. Each piece is made locally in small batches, and the materials are chosen with the specific intention of giving discarded resources a renewed place in a living space.

Designer: Guido Baratta

The choice of Edam isn’t incidental. The city has a long tradition of ceramics craftsmanship, and Artefilo draws on that heritage without replicating it, taking the spirit of making by hand and applying it to a different material palette. Elephant grass combined with recycled plastic, for example, produces a surface that reads as handmade pottery without the environmental cost of extracting virgin clay or new plastic.

The rest of the material list is equally unexpected. Reclaimed wood fibres and brick dust bring texture and warmth to objects that might otherwise feel too composed, while recycled hospital cabinets contribute rigidity and durability that wouldn’t be obvious from the source. Finding these materials requires locating waste streams that industry hasn’t already claimed, then working out what form they can credibly take in a domestic setting.

Making in small batches has real consequences for what the objects can be. It means pieces that are genuinely one-of-a-kind, because material conditions are never exactly repeatable from one batch to the next. Brick dust carries different tones from different sources; reclaimed wood fibres vary in density and grain. That variability isn’t a flaw in the production model; it’s built into it deliberately.

The underlying premise is that objects shape the atmosphere of a space, not dramatically, but persistently. Something placed on a windowsill or bookshelf gets seen many times a day, and that repetition adds up. Artefilo’s design philosophy treats each piece as something that participates in the daily texture of a home rather than simply occupying it. The materials reinforce that, each carrying a visible trace of its previous life.

The atelier distributes through its own online store and through a local stockist in Edam. The collection is small, deliberately so, and the material sourcing means it isn’t trying to scale into something it isn’t. For a design category that often talks about slowing down without quite managing it, Artefilo appears to have structured itself around that idea from the ground up.

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A Natural History Museum That Actually Looks Like Nature

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Museums have a reputation problem. For decades, they’ve been temples of quiet reverence: boxy, imposing, slightly intimidating buildings that seem to announce, before you’ve even walked through the door, that you should already be taking notes. So when a museum opens that genuinely looks like the Earth just pushed it out of the ground, it’s worth paying attention.

The Shenzhen Natural History Museum officially opened on July 28, 2026, in the Pingshan District of Shenzhen, China, and from the very first image you see of it, you understand that something fundamentally different was intended here. Designed by a consortium of 3XN, B+H Architects, and Zhubo Design, the 105,300-square-meter complex sits beside Yanzi Lake and rises in a series of fluid, granite-clad forms that look less like architecture and more like an ancient geological formation that was always meant to be there. That’s not an accident.

Designers: 3XN with B+H Architects and Zhubo Design

“Nothing in nature is square,” said 3XN founder Kim Herforth Nielsen. “Nature is amorphous, dynamic, and always in formation. From the beginning, the ambition was to create not a building, but a piece of landscape that had always been there, shaped by local geology, water and time.” That quote does a lot of heavy lifting, and the building earns it.

The design process was genuinely collaborative in a way that large-scale architecture rarely manages. 3XN led the concept design. B+H Architects handled project delivery, landscape, and interior expertise. Zhubo Design brought the local technical knowledge that a project of this scale in China absolutely requires. Construction began in March 2022 and wrapped up four years later. For a building that looks like a mountain range and functions like a public park, a museum, and a walking route all at once, that timeline is actually impressive.

And yes, it functions like all three of those things simultaneously. The roof is walkable. The grounds are public. The building isn’t sitting behind a fence waiting for you to purchase a ticket before you’re allowed anywhere near it. It opens itself to the city, which feels like a deliberate philosophical statement about who science and natural history actually belong to. I appreciate that enormously. Too many cultural institutions operate like exclusive clubs dressed up as public spaces.

Inside, the experience continues the logic of the exterior. The exhibitions were developed with Atelier Brückner and Museum Studio, and the approach integrates the scenography directly with the architecture. Displays curve along the walls, rising through cone-shaped gallery spaces. Cinematic projections and immersive light installations make the galleries feel like environments you move through rather than rooms you stand politely in. If the outside of the building asks you to rethink what architecture looks like, the inside asks you to rethink what a museum visit feels like.

I’ll be transparent: I’ve seen the images, not the building. And images of architecture, especially this kind, are always a bit of a seduction. Photographs flatten and idealize. The real test of a building like this is whether it holds up over time, whether the crowds and the heat and the ordinary chaos of a functioning public institution diminish what feels, right now, like something genuinely extraordinary. That’s a fair question to hold.

But even accounting for that skepticism, the Shenzhen Natural History Museum makes a compelling argument for what museums can be when they stop treating their buildings as containers and start treating them as part of the story. Natural history is a story about a planet forming itself over billions of years. The building looks like a chapter of that story. That coherence is rare, and when architecture and content align that cleanly, it tends to produce something that lasts.

Shenzhen already has a reputation as a city that builds fast and builds bold. It’s the place where skylines get reinvented in a decade. But this museum isn’t bold for the sake of attention. It’s bold because the subject demanded it. And that distinction, quiet as it is, makes all the difference.

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