12 June, 2025 In our turning points series, design studios share some of the key moments that shaped their business. This week, we meet Accept & Proceed. Accept & Proceed is a London based brand and design studio that works with clients like NASA, Nike and LEGO. Founder David Johnston talks us through some of the decisions that defined his business. In 2006, Johnston took the leap to start his own business, armed with a good name and a willingness to bend the truth about his team… I’d gone through my career learning from big organisations, and one small organisation, and I felt like I wasn’t happy where I was. It was my dad who encouraged me to take a leap of faith and try and go it alone. With nothing more than a month’s wages in the bank and a lot of energy, I decided to go and set up an agency. That really just means giving yourself a name and starting to promote yourself in the world. Accept & Proceed founder David Johnston I think the name itself is a very important thing. I wanted something that was memorable but also layered in meaning. A name that starts with an “a” is very beneficial when you’re being listed in the index of books and things like that. But it became a bit of a compass for the way that we wanted to create work, around accepting the status quo for what it is, but with a continual commitment to proceed nonetheless. Because I didn’t have anyone to work with, in those early months I just made up email addresses of people that didn’t exist. That allowed me to cost projects up for multiple people. That’s obviously a degree of hustle I wouldn’t encourage in everyone, but it meant I was able to charge multiple day rates for projects where I was playing the role of four or five people. Self-initiated projects have long been part of the studio’s DNA and played a key role in building key client relationships. A&P by… was a brief to explore these letterforms without any commercial intent apart from the joy of creative expression. I started reaching out to illustrators and artists and photographers and designers that I really rated, and the things that started coming back were incredible. I was overwhelmed by the amount of energy and passion that people like Mr Bingo and Jason Evans were bringing to this. I think in so many ways, the answer to everything is community. I’ve gone on to work with a lot of the people that created these, and they also became friends. It was an early example of dissolving these illusionary boundaries around what an agency might be, but also expanding and amplifying your potential. The first of Accept & Proceed’s Light Calendars Then in 2006, I was trying to establish our portfolio and I wanted something to send out into the world that would also be an example of how Accept & Proceed thinks about design. I landed on these data visualisations that show the amount of light and darkness that would happen in London in the year ahead. I worked with a freelance designer called Stephen Heath on the first one – he is now our creative director. This kickstarted a 10-year exploration, and they became a rite of passage for new designers that came into the studio, to take that very similar data and express it in completely new ways. It culminated in an exhibition in London in 2016, showing ten years’ of prints. They were a labour of love, but they also meant that every single year we had a number of prints that we could send out to new potential contacts. Still when I go to the global headquarters of Nike in Beaverton in Portland, I’m amazed at how many of these sit in leaders’ offices there. When we first got a finance director, they couldn’t believe how much we’d invested as a business in things like this – we even had our own gallery for a while. It doesn’t make sense from a purely numbers mindset, but if you put things out there for authentic reasons, there are ripple effects over time. In 2017, the studio became a B-corp, the fourth creative agency in the UK to get this accreditation. Around 2016, I couldn’t help but look around – as we probably all have at varying points over the last 10 years – and wondered, what the fuck is going on? All these systems are not fit for purpose for the future – financial systems, food systems, relationship systems, energy systems. They’re not working. And I was like shit, are we part of the problem? Accept & Proceed’s work for the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory I’ve always thought of brand as a piece of technology that can fundamentally change our actions and the world around us. That comes with a huge responsibility. We probably paid four months’ wages of two people full-time just to get accredited, so it’s quite a high bar. But I like that the programme shackles you to this idea of improvement. You can’t rest on your laurels if you want to be re-accredited. It’s like the way design works as an iterative process – you have to keep getting better. In 2019, Johnston and his team started thinking seriously about the studio’s own brand, and created a punchy, nuanced new positioning. We got to a point where we’d proven we could help brands achieve their commercial aims. But we wanted to hold a position ourselves, not just be a conduit between a brand and its audience. It still amazes me that so few agencies actually stand for anything. We realised that all the things – vision, mission, principles – that we’ve been creating for brands for years, we hadn’t done for ourselves. It’s a bit like when you see a hairdresser with a really dodgy haircut. But it’s hard to cut your own hair. So we went through that process, which was really difficult, and we landed on “Design for the future” as our promise to the world. And if you’re going to have that as a promise, you better be able to describe the world you’re creating through your work, which we call “the together world.” Accept & Proceed’s work for Second Sea We stand at this most incredible moment in history where the latest technology and science is catching up with ancient wisdom, to know that we must become more entangled, more together, more whole. And we’ve assessed five global shifts that are happening in order to be able to take us towards a more together world through our work – interbeing, reciprocity, healing, resilience and liberation. The year before last, we lost three global rebrand projects based on our positioning. Every one of them said to me, “You’re right but we’re not ready.” But this year, I think the product market fit of what we’ve been saying for the last five years is really starting to mesh. We’re working with Arc’teryx on their 2030 landscape, evolving Nike’s move to zero, and working with LEGO on what their next 100 years might look like, which is mind-boggling work. I don’t think we could have won any of those opportunities had we not been talking for quite a long time about design for the future. In 2023, Johnston started a sunrise gathering on Hackney Marshes, which became a very significant part of his life. I had the flu and I had a vision in my dreamy fluey state of a particular spot on Hackney Marshes where people were gathering and watching the sunrise. I happened to tell my friend, the poet Thomas Sharp this, and he said, “That’s a premonition. You have to make it happen.” The first year there were five of us – this year there were 300 people for the spring equinox in March. I don’t fully know what these gatherings will lead to. Will Accept & Proceed start to introduce the seasons to the way we operate as a business? It’s a thought I’ve had percolating, but I don’t know. Will it be something else? One of the 2024 sunrise gatherings organised by Accept & Proceed founder David Johnston I do know that there’s major learnings around authentic community building for brands. We should do away with these buckets we put people into, of age group and location. They aren’t very true. It’s fascinating to see the breadth of people who come to these gatherings. Me and Laura were thinking at some point of moving out of London, but I think these sunrise gatherings are now my reason to stay. It’s the thing I didn’t know I needed until I had it. They have made London complete for me. There’s something so ancient about watching our star rise, and the reminder that we are actually just animals crawling upon the surface of a planet of mud. That’s what’s real. But it can be hard to remember that when you’re sitting at your computer in the studio. These gatherings help me better understand creativity’s true potential, for brands, for the world, and for us. Design disciplines in this article Brands in this article What to read next Features Turning Points: Cultural branding agency EDIT Brand Identity 20 Nov, 2024

Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has shifted to AI agents—systems that are less about responding to users’ queries and more about autonomously accomplishing things for them.  There are now a host of Chinese startups building these general-purpose digital tools, which can answer emails, browse the internet to plan vacations, and even design an interactive website. Many of these have emerged in just the last two months, following in the footsteps of Manus—a general AI agent that sparked weeks of social media frenzy for invite codes after its limited-release launch in early March.  These emerging AI agents aren’t large language models themselves. Instead, they’re built on top of them, using a workflow-based structure designed to get things done. A lot of these systems also introduce a different way of interacting with AI. Rather than just chatting back and forth with users, they are optimized for managing and executing multistep tasks—booking flights, managing schedules, conducting research—by using external tools and remembering instructions.  China could take the lead on building these kinds of agents. The country’s tightly integrated app ecosystems, rapid product cycles, and digitally fluent user base could provide a favorable environment for embedding AI into daily life.  For now, its leading AI agent startups are focusing their attention on the global market, because the best Western models don’t operate inside China’s firewalls. But that could change soon: Tech giants like ByteDance and Tencent are preparing their own AI agents that could bake automation directly into their native super-apps, pulling data from their vast ecosystem of programs that dominate many aspects of daily life in the country.  As the race to define what a useful AI agent looks like unfolds, a mix of ambitious startups and entrenched tech giants are now testing how these tools might actually work in practice—and for whom. Set the standard It’s been a whirlwind few months for Manus, which was developed by the Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. The company raised $75 million in a funding round led by the US venture capital firm Benchmark, took the product on an ambitious global roadshow, and hired dozens of new employees.  Even before registration opened to the public in May, Manus had become a reference point for what a broad, consumer‑oriented AI agent should accomplish. Rather than handling narrow chores for businesses, this “general” agent is designed to be able to help with everyday tasks like trip planning, stock comparison, or your kid’s school project.  Unlike previous AI agents, Manus uses a browser-based sandbox that lets users supervise the agent like an intern, watching in real time as it scrolls through web pages, reads articles, or codes actions. It also proactively asks clarifying questions, supports long-term memory that would serve as context for future tasks. “Manus represents a promising product experience for AI agents,” says Ang Li, cofounder and CEO of Simular, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, that’s building computer use agents, AI agents that control a virtual computer. “I believe Chinese startups have a huge advantage when it comes to designing consumer products, thanks to cutthroat domestic competition that leads to fast execution and greater attention to product details.” In the case of Manus, the competition is moving fast. Two of the most buzzy follow‑ups, Genspark and Flowith, for example, are already boasting benchmark scores that match or edge past Manus’s.  Genspark, led by former Baidu executives Eric Jing and Kay Zhu, links many small “super agents” through what it calls multi‑component prompting. The agent can switch among several large language models, accepts both images and text, and carries out tasks from making slide decks to placing phone calls. Whereas Manus relies heavily on Browser Use, a popular open-source product that lets agents operate a web browser in a virtual window like a human, Genspark directly integrates with a wide array of tools and APIs. Launched in April, the company says that it already has over 5 million users and over $36 million in yearly revenue. Flowith, the work of a young team that first grabbed public attention in April 2025 at a developer event hosted by the popular social media app Xiaohongshu, takes a different tack. Marketed as an “infinite agent,” it opens on a blank canvas where each question becomes a node on a branching map. Users can backtrack, take new branches, and store results in personal or sharable “knowledge gardens”—a design that feels more like project management software (think Notion) than a typical chat interface. Every inquiry or task builds its own mind-map-like graph, encouraging a more nonlinear and creative interaction with AI. Flowith’s core agent, NEO, runs in the cloud and can perform scheduled tasks like sending emails and compiling files. The founders want the app to be a “knowledge marketbase”, and aims to tap into the social aspect of AI with the aspiration of becoming “the OnlyFans of AI knowledge creators”. What they also share with Manus is the global ambition. Both Genspark and Flowith have stated that their primary focus is the international market. A global address Startups like Manus, Genspark, and Flowith—though founded by Chinese entrepreneurs—could blend seamlessly into the global tech scene and compete effectively abroad. Founders, investors, and analysts that MIT Technology Review has spoken to believe Chinese companies are moving fast, executing well, and quickly coming up with new products.  Money reinforces the pull to launch overseas. Customers there pay more, and there are plenty to go around. “You can price in USD, and with the exchange rate that’s a sevenfold multiplier,” Manus cofounder Xiao Hong quipped on a podcast. “Even if we’re only operating at 10% power because of cultural differences overseas, we’ll still make more than in China.” But creating the same functionality in China is a challenge. Major US AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have opted out of mainland China because of geopolitical risks and challenges with regulatory compliance. Their absence initially created a black market as users resorted to VPNs and third-party mirrors to access tools like ChatGPT and Claude. That vacuum has since been filled by a new wave of Chinese chatbots—DeepSeek, Doubao, Kimi—but the appetite for foreign models hasn’t gone away.  Manus, for example, uses Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet—widely considered the top model for agentic tasks. Manus cofounder Zhang Tao has repeatedly praised Claude’s ability to juggle tools, remember contexts, and hold multi‑round conversations—all crucial for turning chatty software into an effective executive assistant. But the company’s use of Sonnet has made its agent functionally unusable inside China without a VPN. If you open Manus from a mainland IP address, you’ll see a notice explaining that the team is “working on integrating Qwen’s model,” a special local version that is built on top of Alibaba’s open-source model.  An engineer overseeing ByteDance’s work on developing an agent, who spoke to MIT Technology Review anonymously to avoid sanction, said that the absence of Claude Sonnet models “limits everything we do in China.” DeepSeek’s open models, he added, still hallucinate too often and lack training on real‑world workflows. Developers we spoke with rank Alibaba’s Qwen series as the best domestic alternative, yet most say that switching to Qwen knocks performance down a notch. Jiaxin Pei, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s Institute for Human‑Centered AI, thinks that gap will close: “Building agentic capabilities in base LLMs has become a key focus for many LLM builders, and once people realize the value of this, it will only be a matter of time.” For now, Manus is doubling down on audiences it can already serve. In a written response, the company said its “primary focus is overseas expansion,” noting that new offices in San Francisco, Singapore, and Tokyo have opened in the past month. A super‑app approach Although the concept of AI agents is still relatively new, the consumer-facing AI app market in China is already crowded with major tech players. DeepSeek remains the most widely used, while ByteDance’s Doubao and Moonshot’s Kimi have also become household names. However, most of these apps are still optimized for chat and entertainment rather than task execution. This gap in the local market has pushed China’s big tech firms to roll out their own user-facing agents, though early versions remain uneven in quality and rough around the edges.  ByteDance is testing Coze Space, an AI agent based on its own Doubao model family that lets users toggle between “plan” and “execute” modes, so they can either directly guide the agent’s actions or step back and watch it work autonomously. It connects up to 14 popular apps, including GitHub, Notion, and the company’s own Lark office suite. Early reviews say the tool can feel clunky and has a high failure rate, but it clearly aims to match what Manus offers. Meanwhile, Zhipu AI has released a free agent called AutoGLM Rumination, built on its proprietary ChatGLM models. Shanghai‑based Minimax has launched Minimax Agent. Both products look almost identical to Manus and demo basic tasks such as building a simple website, planning a trip, making a small Flash game, or running quick data analysis. Despite the limited usability of most general AI agents launched within China, big companies have plans to change that. During a May 15 earnings call, Tencent president Liu Zhiping teased an agent that would weave automation directly into China’s most ubiquitous app, WeChat.  Considered the original super-app, WeChat already handles messaging, mobile payments, news, and millions of mini‑programs that act like embedded apps. These programs give Tencent, its developer, access to data from millions of services that pervade everyday life in China, an advantage most competitors can only envy. Historically, China’s consumer internet has splintered into competing walled gardens—share a Taobao link in WeChat and it resolves as plaintext, not a preview card. Unlike the more interoperable Western internet, China’s tech giants have long resisted integration with one another, choosing to wage platform war at the expense of a seamless user experience. But the use of mini‑programs has given WeChat unprecedented reach across services that once resisted interoperability, from gym bookings to grocery orders. An agent able to roam that ecosystem could bypass the integration headaches dogging independent startups. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant behind the Qwen model series, has been a front-runner in China’s AI race but has been slower to release consumer-facing products. Even though Qwen was the most downloaded open-source model on Hugging Face in 2024, it didn’t power a dedicated chatbot app until early 2025. In March, Alibaba rebranded its cloud storage and search app Quark into an all-in-one AI search tool. By June, Quark had introduced DeepResearch—a new mode that marks its most agent-like effort to date.  ByteDance and Alibaba did not reply to MIT Technology Review’s request for comments. “Historically, Chinese tech products tend to pursue the all-in-one, super-app approach, and the latest Chinese AI agents reflect just that,” says Li of Simular, who previously worked at Google DeepMind on AI-enabled work automation. “In contrast, AI agents in the US are more focused on serving specific verticals.” Pei, the researcher at Stanford, says that existing tech giants could have a huge advantage in bringing the vision of general AI agents to life—especially those with built-in integration across services. “The customer-facing AI agent market is still very early, with tons of problems like authentication and liability,” he says. “But companies that already operate across a wide range of services have a natural advantage in deploying agents at scale.”

For dedicated surfers, surfboards are wonderful things—when you're riding them. At every other point in time, they're a hassle. You have to have the room in your home to store them. The need to transport them influences your choice of vehicle. If you want to transport one on a plane or a train, be prepared to pay extra fees, and keep your fingers crossed that they don't get destroyed during the baggage handling process.Ewen Mahévas and Hadrien Nauroy are two French surfers who met in engineering school. Frustrated with the hassles of transporting their boards, the two spent several years designing a sturdy surfboard that could be broken down. They also wanted to be able to assemble it in less than a minute, without the use of tools. Their resultant modular design is called the Newave:The boards are made of fiberglass, foam and resin, and feature a unique W-shaped connection point made of reinforced nylon. You join the pieces by locking pins into place by hand. The pair developed their design after strenuous strength testing to ensure the boards' performance. They make seven different components, which you can shape into nine different configurations. Obviously you only buy the components you want, and can later pick up different ones to mix and match. The Newave board comes with a backpack to carry them in. These have been successfully Kickstarted, with 22 days left to pledge at press time. The boards start at $731 for the shortest configuration, going up to $1,117 for the 9' longboard.

A miraculous tool for the modern-day modelmaker is the handheld ultrasonic cutter. These combine the precision of an X-Acto with the convenience of a Dremel, and in the past few years, they've come a long way.Just a few years ago the state-of-the-art was this Wondercutter S, by South Korean manufacturer Cutra. The actual tool part that you hold onto was tiny, but it required being tethered to this base for power. Last year Chinese tool manufacturer Hanboost unveiled their C1 Ultrasonic Cutter, a cordless model that lets you ditch the tether. Now Hozo, a Chinese manufacturer of notably designey tools, has pushed it a bit further with their NeoBlade ultrasonic cutter. The NeoBlade is also cordless, but features both a charging dock (the C1 required a USB cable) and hot-swappable batteries, reducing downtime for longer jobs. Conveniently, the dock is designed to hold both the tool with a battery in it, and a standalone backup battery. In addition to improving the UX with the charging dock, Hozo has added some welcome safety features. Blade changes are made easier and safer for the clumsy, thanks to this blade holder that keeps your fingertips away from the pointy bits.And when it comes time to dispose of blades, the dispenser has a one-way slot on the back to hold the spent ones. There are two modes: A press-to-power mode for precision, where you need to hold the button down to make it cut, and a continuous mode for longer cuts. Like the other ultrasonic tools, it can cut through a variety of materials, and offers multiple blade types. Here's the demo:The NeoBlade has been successfully Kickstarted, with 47 days left to pledge at press time. The $150 tool is schedule to ship in August.