THINGS GOT WEIRD by Johan Ronnestam. Week 38

Hey all – Working from Jeffreys Bay, South Africa this week. Home of the best wave on the planet :)

The weather is rubbish. So we're waiting. That's what you do as a surfer. You wait. (Tribute to one of the worlds greatest ads)

But the world did not slow down while I waited.

Somebody put the Twin Towers back in the New York sky. Ten thousand agents took down a two hundred year old maths problem. A robot walked out of the factory that built it. And Jony Ive spent four years on a button.

Oh. This is a proper newsletter now. Hit subscribe and it turns up every Monday.

Let's get weird.

1. 2,977 Drones Over The New York Skyline

Let's start with a celebration. Actually, 2,977 of them.

Twenty five years since the towers came down. To mark it, Studio Drift and Shigeru Ban flew 2,977 drones over New York harbour and put both towers back into the sky. Full size. Made of light. One drone for every life lost that day.

Then the detail that really got me. The shape comes from a building that was drawn for that site and never built.

So it finally got built. For one night.

Light is a building material now. Somebody tell the architects.

No logo. No product. Nothing to click. Gone by morning.

It will outlive every campaign that ran next to it.

2. Ten Thousand Agents Walked Into A 200 Year Old Maths Problem

They came out eighty-eight hours later with an answer.

Navier-Stokes. One of seven famous maths problems nobody has ever solved. There's a million dollars waiting if you do.

OpenAI says they're not taking the money. Either that's very honest or very good marketing. Maybe both.

Then they spent another seventeen hours writing the proof in a language a computer can read, so a machine could check their homework. That part impresses me more than the answer.

Mathematicians are shouting at each other about who got there first. Two other teams have raised a hand. Good. That's how it should work.

The thinking was never the hard part. The checking was.

3. XPeng Builds Robot Workers That Build Robot Workers

Watch the clip. The line finishes the machine, the machine stands up, and off it goes. First day on the job and it has already walked out.

XPeng switched on a factory built to make humanoid robots. Over eighty per cent of it runs without people. 21 joints in each hand, which is more than you are using to scroll this.

So the factory makes the worker. And the worker is built to work in a factory.

You see where this is going.

Same week, eleven companies put humanoid robots on a catwalk in Berlin. Backflips. Tai Chi. The splits.

Building them is the easy part now. Making people want one is not.

They still look like equipment.

4. A 22 Year Old In Kenya Built A Pair Of Hands For 350 Dollars

Favourite thing this week. Not close.

Norah Kimathi's hands turn a teacher's voice into sign language, live, at the front of the class. 3D printed. 78 schools already.

There was no African sign language data to teach it with. So she made her own. Deaf teachers put on suits covered in sensors and signed until there was enough.

300,000 deaf children in Kenya. Around 20,000 of them in school.

Every other story in here has nine zeros in the budget. This one has three.

Funny how that works.

5. Apple Finally Folded The iPhone

Samsung shipped a folding phone in 2019.

I guess Apple loves to play the Lucky 7. Cause now, seven years later, they launch the iPhone Duo, as if no one ever came up with the idea before. And as often before, they do it with style.

Seven years of everyone agreeing folding phones were a niche. Over in ninety minutes. By the company that contributed nothing to the category.

Not engineering. Authority.

Somebody else takes the risk. Apple takes the margin. Almost rude how well it works.

Second mover can be good. Apple knows first mover only works when the tech is ready.

However – a final word – Apple. You still don't understand that this should have been a iPhone Unfold Mini. THEN I'd loved it.

6. First A Ferrari. Now A Button.

Four years. On a button. Jony knows how to convince clients that small things make big things happen.

His industrial design company LoveFrom and Moncler showed Moncore on 10 September. A down base layer, then a field jacket, a parka or a poncho that snap straight onto it.

The bit doing the snapping is a magnetic duo button, and it took four years to get right.

Four years. On the fastener.

He helped Apple become what it is. He took on Ferrari. He is building the OpenAI device that is going to change how all of us live – and this week the news is a magnet on a coat.

Most companies would have shipped it in eleven weeks and called it innovation. Moncler obviously knows innovation takes time (or should it really take this much time?).

Ive: "To do something truly simple is extremely hard."

They launched it by opening the biggest store Moncler has ever built, 24,000 square feet on Fifth Avenue, nine metre ceilings, in the old FAO Schwarz space.

So what part of your business are you prepared to spend four years on? Think hard, it might be worth it!

7. Vans Gave A Pop Star The Pen

Vans made SZA its artistic director back in 2025. Plenty of people wrote it off as another celebrity press release.

This week the work turned up. At New York Fashion Week, which is not where you expect to find a skate brand.

VANSZA. A hiking boot with a split toe. A Knu Skool mule. Camo in places camo should not be. Two days on the Bowery, then the first drop lands in October.

Put it next to the button story. Ive spends four years on something nobody will ever really notice. Vans hands the pen over and lets somebody else decide.

Opposite ends. Both work.

It's the middle that kills you. That's where a group of people smooth an idea until nobody is against it and nobody cares.

8. Chalmers Just Made Quantum 1,000 Times Faster

Chalmers made a whole group of quantum operations more than a thousand times faster. One cycle instead of several thousand.

Speed is not just showing off here. Time is a qubit's worst enemy, and every extra cycle is another chance for it to trip over its own feet. Shorter operation, cleaner answer. Better accuracy for free, which basically never happens.

Eyebrow up, as always. Still theory and simulation. The experiment comes next.

Gothenburg. Sweden. I love it!

9. Design Just Overtook Retail In The UK Economy

This one deserves a round of applause.

Design is now the single biggest contributor to the UK economy. 136.7 billion pounds, against 114 for retail. One pound in every twenty. Growing at 40 per cent since 2019, while the economy around it grew 24. And it supports 2.27 million jobs.

Eighty per cent of those designers work outside the design business. In product teams, service teams, IT departments, hospitals and banks.

Design stopped being an industry and became a function.

Good week to be a designer!

THINGS NOT TOO WEIRD, BUT STILL WORTH READING

• Meta launched an agent called Muse that keeps working after you close the app. Meanwhile the band Muse, going since 1994, now posts as @museband. Thirty two years of brand building and it turns out your handle was rented.
• Apple now gives you a receipt that proves a photo was really taken. Give it two years and a picture without one will be treated as fake. Yours included.
• Amazon started selling ads inside ChatGPT. Space it doesn't own, in a product it didn't build. Bold.
• A cave in Yunnan gave up five Denisovan fossils and 30,000 years of life in one place. Until now we knew these people from a finger bone.
• Humanoid robots got their own global sports league. Industry, then assistants, now athletes. Sponsors next, obviously.
• Sony brought back the WH-1000XM4 as a brand new 2026 product, because people liked that one better than what came after. That takes confidence.
• And a night train now runs Brussels to Milan over the Gotthard from 29.99 euro. No app. No algorithm. Somebody just went and did it.

Five uncomfortable questions for Monday

• If a machine did work your business depends on, could anybody here check it?
• What would you build with 350 dollars and one afternoon in the actual room?
• What part of your business are you prepared to spend four years on?
• Would you hand the pen over, or do you only want their audience?
• Who makes design decisions in your company without the word design in their title?

Last week the future learned to use a computer. This week it walked off a production line, onto a catwalk, and into a classroom in Nairobi. Next week it probably asks for a chair.

Forecast says Thursday. You'll find me in the water. Or standing next to it, looking at it.

Subscribe if you haven't. Forward it if you liked it.

With love Johan

ps. To get in touch or hire Johan for branding, innovation, product development or keynote events – Send me a message or an email (google Johan Ronnestam Creative Studio)