Need to Know
18 : 01 : 22

Global – Designed specifically for people of colour, Useful School is a new pay-what-you-can online design curriculum championing a next-gen approach to education.

Launched in response to the sustained under-representation of people of colour in the design sector, the school follows a curriculum that is built from the ground up to focus on equity. As its founder Ritesh Gupta explains: ‘We’re divesting – we have classes centring people of colour the whole way through, from constraining certain projects to utilise fonts by people of colour to helping students rally around answering questions that people of colour face at work.'

Kicking off with two classes based around product design, Useful School intends to help students build a portfolio and hone their personal style, while ensuring it's accessible to all. To do this, it operates under a pay-what-you-can model.

With everything from its syllabus to branding diverging from traditional academia, Useful School is an inspiring example of the emerging education frameworks we identified in Modern (Un)learning, a trend that makes up the Reformation Generation.

Las Vegas – Aiming to eliminate the laborious process of food preparation, South Korean innovator Beyond Honeycomb has created an AI-powered robot that can recreate the taste and texture of restaurant-level meals. With the tagline ‘famous chef dishes for everyone’, the kitchen robot has ambitious plans to democratise the fine dining experience.

As the restaurant industry continues to face labour shortages and pandemic-induced closures, Beyond Honeycomb hopes that replacing trained chefs with machines that can be installed in commercials kitchens worldwide will help to free the hospitality sector from its reliance on skilled labour. By analysing the molecular data of a dish while it is cooking, the AI is able to reproduce each meal, memorising new recipes in just 48 hours.

Envisaging a future when chefs are not limited by the constraints of time and geography, Beyond Honeycomb could allow chefs to release recipes that can be reproduced thanks to AI-powered machines. To learn more about the disruptors bridging appetites and algorithms, read our interview with food innovator Alon Chen.

The Millennial popularity of body positive shapewear brands such as Skims, Heist and Spanx is pointing to longer-term growth for the market. According to a report by Research and Markets, the global shapewear market is forecast to be worth £2.7bn ($3.7bn, €3.2bn) by 2028.

Set to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8% from 2021 to 2028, the market for shapewear has benefited from a range of cultural shifts. Originally created to conceal or 'flatten' parts of the body, contemporary shapewear instead embraces body positivity and diversity. For younger customers, the category is about showing off instead of covering up. ‘Shapewear is not about hiding defects for Millennials and Gen Z shoppers; rather, it is seen as apparel that improves rather than alters one’s appearance,’ notes the report.

Furthermore, thanks to developments in fabric technology, shapewear is less uncomfortable and restrictive, with many consumers opting to wear the garment as loungewear or outerwear. As the body positivity movement continues to influence fashion design, the rise of shapewear points to the shifting nature of lingerie marketing which we have previously explored in Femininity Rebranded.