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Since Friday, protests over immigration raids have erupted across Los Angeles. The demonstrations escalated after President Trump deployed the National Guard into the city on Saturday. Troops used aggressive tactics to disperse the rallies, including firing rubber bullets, using flash-bang stun grenades, and spraying tear gas into the crowds. The photographs emerging from the weekend are unsettling. An unlikely symbol of whats happening in the city has emerged in images of protesters near Gloria Molina Grand Park taking cover behind hot pink benches, chairs, and tables. Demonstrators frequently use whats available around them as barricades, and often thats street furniture: trash cans, benches, construction signsanything that can be picked up and moved. But those hot pink seats tell an L.A.specific story of the conflict at hand. [Photo: Apu Gomes/Getty Images] Designed by the architecture firm Rios, Grand Park has been at the center of the pro-immigrant demonstrations. It is adjacent to Los Angeless City Hall and just a few blocks away from the Metropolitan Detention Center, a site where protesters gathered and where ICE is holding its detainees. The park itself was designed to represent Los Angeless multicultural population and to be a park for everyone. Rios was adamant that the public space feature movable seatinglike in New Yorks Bryant Park and Pariss Luxembourg Gardensso that visitors had flexibility in how they used it (aside from sleeping on them), so they designed a custom collection to meet those needs. The furniture is made from powder-coated aluminum, and the hot pink color nods to the hue of the flowers that grow in equatorial countries, where many of the citys residents have roots, and to the bougainvillea vines found throughout the city. When the park opened 11 years ago, it was furnished with hundreds of these pieces, more specifically 26 freestanding benches, 41 wall-mounted benches, 120 cafe tables, and 240 cafe chairs, all made by the Southern California manufacturer Janus et Cie. Grand Molina Park, ca. 2012. [Photo: Channone Arif/Flickr] The park is a place for people to come together and find community, says Andy Lantz, the co-CEO and creative director of Rios. This idea of being able to reconfigure the use of the space with movable furniture was fundamental to making it a park for all. In the years since it opened, the park has become the gathering place Rios intended, hosting weekend dance parties, morning yoga classes, food trucks, and political rallies. The community-focused nature of the space represents whats at risk because of the raids. Angelenos are worried about their friends and neighbors and are doing what they can to protect their communities and civic values. Amid this context, the furniture found a new use to provide security and protection. While endless configurations was part of the furniture design brief, Lantz never imagined what that might mean in the context of a demonstration. He experienced a flood of emotion when he first saw photographs of protesters using the powder-coated aluminum furniture as a shield. The benches, which are about six feet long and weigh 70 pounds, have just the right dimensions to cover a human body when propped on its side; a chair, which weighs about 25 pounds, can be held up by its wire frame and crouched behind. I’ve looked at [the photos] multiple times todayI’ve been proud, I’ve been upset, I’ve been startled, he says. Seeing our work repurposed in a moment of collective action was humbling and powerful. Since Grand Park opened, Rios has used the Civic collection of street furniture in parks it designed in Palm Springs and Houston, among other cities. Bright blue editions are also present in New Yorks Brooklyn Bridge Park. Lantz wonders if the events that happened over the last few days in L.A. will inspire designers to think about the parks they make in new ways. As designers, do you need to start thinking of public space as defensible for these types of actions? he says. It seems that the design brief for street furniture just got a lot more complicated.
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June 14 is shaping up to be a big day, with millions of Americans expected to take to the streets in an event dubbed “No Kings Day,” which organizers have said will likely be the largest single-day turnout of the anti-Trump, pro-democracy protest movement since President Donald Trump took office for a second term in January. Organizers expect 1,800 rallies will take place on Saturday for “a nationwide day of defiance” in every state and major city across the countryexcept Washington, D.C., as to avoid clashes with the Army’s 250th anniversary celebrations, which will be held that day in the nation’s capital (more on that below). In a statement to Fast Company, the No Kings organizers described their event as “peaceful, organized, and united.” They added: “Make it clear: We dont do kings in this country.” The No Kings website further explains: “From city blocks to small towns, from courthouse steps to community parks, we’re taking action to reject authoritarianismand show the world what democracy really looks like . . . On June 14th, were showing up everywhere he [Trump] isntto say no thrones, no crowns, no kings.” The No Kings protest is sponsored by Indivisible and a broad coalition of over 180 partner organizations, including: the ACLU, Common Cause, Greenpeace, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Standing Up for Science, and a number of unions, including the Communication Workers of America and teacher federations. “Even conservative estimates say that 3.5 million people turned out for the Hands Off mobilization on April 5,” Indivisible’s Ezra Levin told Fast Company. “No Kings [in the U.S] is on track to exceed that by millions more . . . With events [in] red states, blue states, purple states, rural areas, suburban areas, urban areas, United States, North America, Europe, South Americawere all over.” The anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy protests aim to counter President Trump’s multimillion-dollar military parade in Washington, D.C., that day to celebrate the Armys 250th anniversary, which will be held on Trumps 79th birthday, which is also Flag Day. According to the Associated Press, Trump has long wanted a military parade, which is expected to feature 6,600 soldiers, 150 vehicles, and 50 helicopters on a route from Arlington, Virginia to the National Mall, where there will be a fireworks display. The Army initially estimated that the cost for the day’s birthday celebrations, including the parade, would range from $25 million to $45 million, with the cost now looking closer to $40 million, according to USA Today. The celebrations come at a time when the Trump administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has slashed budgets and jobs at federal agencies, including the Defense Department, per the AP. The parade’s enormous price tag has further angered many Americans and Trump critics already fed up by the president’s overall mishandling of the economy from tariffs to immigration, which has been dubbed the TACO presidency, for “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
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Apple has killed the future of computing. With iPadOS 26, it turned the dream of computing visionaries like Alan Kay and Jef Raskin (and of Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, too) into an overpriced touchscreen MacBook with an optional keyboard. Back when it launched in 2010, the iPad was meant to be the escape hatch from the cluttered, file-strewn, window-management hellscape of traditional computing. It was the ultimate expression of Kay’s Dynabook, a book-like device that was mostly screen. Kay, a legendary Xerox PARC computer scientist, imagined that the Dynabook would democratize access to computers without people having to learn arcane coding languages. Today, though, the iPad has become a cluttered compromise. Apple has transformed the iPadOS into MacOS with some touch UX details. Now you can make apps run in windows that can overlap each other, just like the way you can run many iOS and iPad apps in the Mac. There are menus and submenus too, which run across the top of the screen in some apps, just like the Mac (but, unlike the Mac, they are not a permanent UX element, appearing and disappearing depending of the app you are running). Windows can tile, turning it into a finger-clickable oversize pop-up window. [Image: Apple] The power of modal UX Apple believes that all this brings more power to the user. I would argue that it detracts from it, like Raskin discovered while developing the first Macintosh computer before Jobs took it away from him in 1981. He was a computer engineer, artist, writer, and human interface expert, who originally advocated leaving the command line interface for computers with a single purpose that anyone could use without training, like a toaster or an immersion blender in the real world. These information appliances would have the right buttons, software, and network connectivity to perform specific tasks effortlessly. Raskin envisioned them becoming invisible to userspart of their daily life. Eventually, he realized that having one gadget for each task was impractical. His answer was the mouse and graphical user interfaces, which he believed could bring computing a bit closer to his original idea. A computer could have programs focused on specialized taskslike word processors, painting programs, or a calculatorwith specialized interfaces designed so people could understand them intuitively. He started the Macintosh project at Apple in 1979, hiring legends like Bill Atkinson, the father of the menu bar and countless other fundamental graphic UX elements (who sadly recently passed away), Andy Hertzfeld, the main architect of the Mac’s system software, and Burrell Smith, who created the Mac’s hardware. He brought on other luminaries like Steve Capps (who later helmed the Newton project, the origin of the iPhone and the iPad), Bruce Horn (who created the Finder), and Susan Kare (who designed all the Mac’s icons and made all things wonderful in the pixel world), and they went on a mission to realize Raskin’s vision. Their genius ushered in the second computing revolution. And yet, the Mac wasnt the solution Raskin had in mind. It required users to manage files and windows. It required them to learn conventions and navigate through menus, even if it was orders of magnitude more intuitive than the command line. Soon, it got too complicatedand still is to this day. No matter how many clean-up attempts Apple has tried, it’s fundamentally too complex. It wasnt until the iPhone and touchscreens that Raskins idea materialized thanks to apps that turned to the phone into a specialize device for each task. Later, the iPad became the ultimate expression of that powerful idea. It embodied Raskins core philosophy: an immersive device focused and modal, that could transform instantly into the tool you neededa sketchpad, a typewriter, a comic book reader, a video editor. Billions of people around the planet instantly got it. One app, full screen, your mind uncluttered. The complexity was hidden; its purpose was clear. The iPad was, as I wrote back for Gizmodo when it came out, the future. It wasnt perfect by any means, but it had the potential to become the ultimate computing device. Years later, I changed my Mac for an iPad Pro. I loved it. The iPad put me in the zone and minimized distraction. I used it exclusively for several years and only changed to a Macbook Air because I needed to use Premiere for new projects. [Image: Apple] A squandered golden opportunity Which brings me back to iPadOS 26 and trying to understand its very existence. Fifteen years after Apple first introduced the iPad as a new form of computing we’ve landed back on the Mac. The company that once championed simplicity against the tyranny of overlapping windows and nested menus has now bolted those things onto the iPad. With iPadOS 26 the iPad is not a truly liberated information appliance anymore, free from desktop baggage. And its certainly not a full-fledged Macas it still lacks the power-user features, the robust file system, and the sheer flexibility of macOS. We didnt need a decade and a half to arrive at a mediocre compromise. If Apple had truly lost faith in the iPads unique visionthe vision that differentiated itthey should have had the guts to kill it. Just kill the damn thing and make a MacBook Air with a detachable keybard. Go ahead. Slap touchscreens on every Mac in the line and call it a day. Just dont make an iPad thats less than it was meant to be, clumsily aping the thing it was supposed to replace. Perhaps clinging to the original idea of a new computing paradigm is an untenable idea. But this compromise feels particularly bad right now, right at the very moment where theres a clear window of opportunity for Apple. Maybe the iPad should have gone totally away from the Mac and doubled down on AI. Maybe the iPad was already in the right place to become the true future of computing. It was a blank canvas. The right opportunity to reimagine computing around AI, to make it useful in a more natural way that is not constrained by the size of the iPhone (which I still think is the only true AI device, just too small to be useful for many things). And no, I don’t know what that looks like. That’s why Apple’s UX designers get paid. What I do know is Apple might have squandered its chance to create a completely new AI-based computer user experience.
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