Colony presents three emerging practices in its third annual Designer's Residency

Strategy firm and design gallery Colony announced the third iteration of its annual Designers' Residency incubator program. Launched in 2023, the Designers' Residency aims to introduce the work of emerging talents to the international design market under the guidance of Colony founder Jean Lin and art director Madeleine Parsons. This year's program brought three new studios to Colony's roster: Another.World, Studio B.C. Joshua and MTM Studio.

"The Residency has been some of the most fruitful and rewarding work of my career," says Lin. "Watching our designers grow exponentially in their practices in a holistic and mindful way reminds us of the importance of self-reflection in our own projects and for Colony as a whole. The 2025 cohort has been one of immense growth and trust in the Residency process and the resulting work is a reflection of this," she adds.

Launched to create more accessibility and opportunity to burgeoning talent in an industry that is often fraught with obstacles to entry, the 2025 Residency's young talents were selected from an open application process that drew interest from American designers across the globe. Colony welcomed three residents in its third year who bring a world of inspiration to the program from near and far. Youtian Duan and Yingxi Ji of Another.World presented transportive designs united by an exploration into their vulnerable inner worlds with the From Elsewhere collection; Minneapolis-born designer, Blake C. Joshua of Studio B.C. Joshua brought his ancestral history to life with the Harlem Cottage collection; Maxwell Taylor-Milner of MTM Studio looked closely at historical influences with their elemental and material-driven Recent Relics collection.

Their work debuted in the international design market with an exhibition at Colony's Tribeca gallery on April 17, 2025. The designers will consequently be added to Colony's roster of independent American design talents, bolstering the trajectories of their careers. "Especially now, with our environment changing at such a challenging pace, thoughtful design feels like a belief system for interacting with the world. Not just for preserving physical experience, but for preserving our attention to form and narrative. It's been an honour to work with the 2025 residents toward their collections taking up the space they deserve," she adds.

Artist, designer and maker Youtian Duan and visual storyteller Yingxi Ji are the creative minds behind Another.World, an innovative design studio dedicated to reimagining the relationship between humans, inanimate objects and nature. Their unconventional and humorous projects are gateways to an imagined realm, a safe and inclusive space where individuality shines.

Their debut collection at Colony, From Elsewhere, was born out of the designers' wild, untamed imaginations, bringing to life the remnants of dreams and glitches in reality. Objects are not just objects; these furniture designs are alive, each with its magic, purpose and untold story. Each of the three pieces is instilled with a unique personality, coming to life as residents in a new, imagined realm. Their Love Seat is more than a place to rest—it is a keeper of intimacy, a silent witness to whispered secrets and unspoken connections; the Treasure Box is a guardian, a sentient archive of secrets and memories who knows its keeper better than they know themselves; A Portal Clock serves as a threshold, a trickster, a guide, that bends reality.

The work of Studio B.C. Joshua is infused with a unique blend of cultural and environmental influences, producing expressive furnishings that balance rawness with nostalgia, the rough and the refined, the ephemeral and the grounded. His seven-piece Harlem Cottage collection draws from the rich cabin culture of his native Minnesota, recounting tangible stories that foster deep connections to his audience. The collection considers what chair designs and table designs inspired by African American history might look like with a series of three unique seating concepts, the Vincent, Queen Marley and the Rift chair, two editions of Joshua's Dogtrot table and two editions of the Cottage Window fixture.

The Vincent, Queen Marley and Rift chairs draw inspiration from the beauty and imperfections of architecture and design within the African diaspora, implementing zig-zag motifs traditionally found in African American textiles alongside waved textures reminiscent of the natural patterns of curly hair. The Dogtrot tables present a miniature reconstruction of the dogtrot-style homes of the South, hand-painted with images of African American heroes, particularly the Black Cowboy and joy in a palette influenced by Jacob Lawrence’s The Great Migration series. The final piece in the collection, the Cottage Window, available with or without a silhouette, draws from the empowerment of the Harlem Renaissance, a period of artistic expression that opened new conversations about identity and belonging in American culture.

Brooklyn-based Maxwell Taylor-Milner of MTM Studio combines their background in design and art history to create works that engage not only the expressive capacity of materials but the history of the forms into which they are moulded. For their debut at Colony, Taylor-Milner reflected on the effects of the desert landscape that served as an ever-present backdrop from their childhood in rural northern New Mexico to their time working at Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. The works in Recent Relics reflect on the elemental effects of nature, how it changes and grows, how light, heat and water shape the land along with everything on it and how a single object could show the evidence of the system that created it.

The collection consists of three objects, all of them an expression of a single material and its defining property: the luminescence of a cast resin in the Slightly Plastic Effervescent Lamp (SPE Lamp), the contrast between roughly sandcast and highly polished aluminum surfaces manifested in the Clear Gradual Boundary Mirror (CGB Mirror) and the burnished, striated surface of burned pine wood in the Very Dark Brown Desk (VDB Desk). With historical reference reflected in the form of a frame or shape of a leg, each product design in the collection is instilled with a personal and living history. By expressing forms and materials that are emergent, changing yet eternal, they also speak to resilience—a self that, through transformation, endures.

The multifaceted, eight-eight-month intensive Residency program was crafted by Lin and Parsons, informed by their time as professors at Parsons and RISD. Under the guidance of Colony's leadership, the designers are taught to navigate the stages of starting and launching a studio, setting them up for success in the contemporary design landscape. To aid in the financial hurdles associated with establishing a studio, Colony subsidises shop space as well as employs the residents at the gallery, offering invaluable studio and curation experience at a professional level.