At this year’s Design Miami.Paris, Apple and Design Miami introduce Designers of Tomorrow, a new initiative celebrating four emerging creative voices who are subverting expectations – and quelling fears – regarding man’s place at the helm of making in the age of AI. The program, curated by Rodman Primack and juried by Apple’s own design leaders, Alan Dye, Vice President of Human Interface Design, and Molly Anderson, Vice President of Industrial Design, spotlights how creativity flourishes when technology becomes an extension of the hand rather than its replacement. Each of the selected designers has integrated the iPad Pro, into their practice as a key creative instrument – not merely as a digital tool, but as a surface of intuition, experimentation, and touch.
Designers of Tomorrow Exhibition \\\ Photo: Elodie Croquet
Among these voices is Jolie Ngo, a ceramicist and designer whose work captures the intersection of tradition and technology with an uncommon sensitivity. Her featured pieces for Designers of Tomorrow – ‘Lantern Vessel in Between Worlds’ and ‘Table Lamp in Cherry Blossoms and Himalayan Salt’ – reveal a new hybrid language: one that transforms digital processes into emotive objects.
“The iPad feels surprisingly tactile,” Ngo says. “Drawing or sculpting directly on the screen allows me to follow instinct and gesture in real time – it’s closer to shaping clay than using a computer. The technology becomes an extension of touch, keeping the work experimental and alive.”
Powered by Apple’s most advanced technology, the latest iPad Pro takes this sense of fluid creation to a new dimension. With a 10-core GPU and a Neural Accelerator in each core, M5 delivers a 3.5x leap in AI performance compared to its predecessor, allowing artists and designers to sketch, model, and render complex forms with unprecedented immediacy. For Ngo, that power translates directly into her workflow. Using Nomad Sculpt on iPad, she develops intricate 3D sketches – asymmetrical forms, ornamental finials, bronze pull chains – that might once have required hours of manual prototyping.
With up to 6.7x faster 3D rendering, Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, and an ultra-thin design that weighs less than ever before, it redefines mobility for artists, architects, and storytellers alike. Whether sketching in Procreate, rendering in Octane X, or sculpting in Nomad, creators can now move from concept to form without interruption and without losing the rhythm of their imagination.
“I can sculpt wherever I am,” she explains. “On the subway, between firings in the studio – the iPad lets me capture ideas in motion. Later, I bring them into Rhino on my MacBook Pro for fabrication. That back-and-forth between spontaneity and precision mirrors how clay behaves – unpredictable, but grounded.”
This approach – intuitive, hybrid, emotionally charged – captures what Apple’s M5 chip was designed to enable. Beyond raw performance, the new iPad Pro introduces features that make creative workflows more immediate and embodied. The Ultra Retina XDR display with tandem OLED technology brings extreme brightness and color fidelity to digital sketching and editing. iPadOS 26 introduces a new windowing system that lets artists layer, organize, and switch between apps with fluid motion – echoing the natural flow of a studio workspace. And with the Apple Pencil Pro, sensitivity and gesture detection are so refined that the distinction between drawing and sculpting begins to blur.
“The iPad allows ideas to live between worlds – between sketch and sculpture, between the mind and the hand,” Ngo adds. “It reminds me that technology can feel human. Clay resists perfection, but so does creativity. The magic happens in that tension.”
Apple’s broader partnership with Design Miami deepens a philosophy that has excited since the early days of Macintosh, where hardware continues to serve as a platform for creative visibility as well as connection with the greater artistic community and beyond. Technology imbued with intention can amplify human craft rather than replace or undercut it. This partnership demonstrates how the next generation of designers are not choosing between analog or digital but instead using both to expand what’s possible in form, material, and meaning.
Through the iPad Pro with M5, Apple continues to test the elasticity of that boundary between power and poetry, speed and stillness, code and craft. The next era of design, it seems, will be built not in opposition to technology, but through the feel of it.
Continue reading to see works by Jolie Ngo and the other artists featured in Designers of Tomorrow…
Lantern Vessel in Between Worlds by Jolie Ngo \\\ Photo: Elodie Croquet
Table Lamp in Cherry Blossoms and Himalayan Salt by Jolie Ngo \\\ Photo: Elodie Croquet
Artist Jolie Ngo \\\ Photo: Elodie Croquet
Jello Coffee Table by Marco Campardo \\\ Photo: Elodie Croquet
CR Boxes System by Marie and Alexandre \\\ Photo: Elodie Croquet
Noetigram v0.9 by Duyi Han \\\ Photo: Elodie Croquet
The iPad Pro with M5 is now available on apple.com, and in the Apple Store app in 31 countries and regions.
iPad imagery provided by Apple. Design Miami.Paris photography by Elodie Croquet.
