1. Beer as the killer app.

Nothing sums up 2025 quite like a company trying to sell friendship as a wearable device. The $129 AI pendant Friend promised constant companionship via texted pep talks and soft breathing noises. Instead, it inspired subway vandalism and a perfectly petty Heineken billboard featuring a bottle opener necklace and the tagline: “The best way to make a friend is over a beer.”

While Friend vaguely promises to be your “wearable friend,” Heineken’s pendant actually does something useful: it opens beers, a proven friendship technology since 1873. The joke works because it exposes how absurd our quest for algorithmic intimacy has become. Friend has sold only 3,500 units and inspired more mockery than connection, yet it accidentally succeeded at its mission: people bonded over laughing at it. Maybe that’s the real future of social tech - uniting us, one collective eye roll at a time.

2. Game night gets a software update.

If you’re a parent, you know the paradox: board games are great for family connection, but they also mean a closet overflowing with boxes, missing pieces you’ll discover mid-game, and that one kid who flips the Monopoly board when they’re losing. Meanwhile, screens are the enemy of togetherness. Except when you desperately need twenty minutes of peace. Brynn Putnam’s Board tries to split the difference: a $499 touchscreen that lies flat like a tabletop and runs a dozen digital board games using physical pieces it can detect and interact with. Think of it as a Kindle for game night, condensing your collection into one glowing slab.

Instead of everyone disappearing into their own devices, the family gathers around one. Somehow, that feels meaningfully different. Skeptics will note that $500 buys a lot of cardboard, and they’re right. But there’s something intriguing about a device that meets families where they already live: in front of screens, just trying to make that time feel a little more human. Whether it works depends on what you value more—the tactile charm of cardboard or the tidy efficiency of pixels pretending to be it.

3. Sunlight tattoos.

Most people try to avoid sunburns. French artist Thomas Mailaender uses them as his medium. He projects historical photo negatives onto models’ skin using powerful UV lamps, essentially tattooing vintage images through controlled sun damage. Portraits, landscapes, and forgotten snapshots appear on the body for only a few minutes before fading naturally in the light. Mailaender photographs them in that fleeting moment between creation and disappearance, when skin becomes both canvas and film.

It’s photography about photography. An inversion of everything we usually protect ourselves from. His book Illustrated People pairs these ephemeral skin prints with the original archival images, creating a dialogue between permanent historical records and temporary bodily impressions. There’s something quietly profound about using human skin, our most impermanent surface, to host ghosts of the past. The burns heal, the images vanish, but the photographs of their vanishing remain: a reminder that all art (and all of us) is, by design, temporary.