Bankston and design platform For Scale argue that physical interaction matters, staging exhibitions across New York City and Copenhagen to prove that hardware is one of the most intimate touchpoints in the built environment.
The collaboration kicked off in May during NYCxDesign. The partners transformed Colbo wine bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side into a venue for A Manifesto on Touch. The installation centered on a written provocation by design critic David Michon, which makes a case for touch as sensation and sensation as information. To test this theory, guests were invited to tear strips from posters—a rip being a kind of pull, and a pull being a kind of handle.
Custom stools and tables fabricated by Los Angeles artist Caleb Engstrom were fitted with hardware from the Super Collection by Sans-Arc Studio and The Streaks by YSG Studio. Mirrors edged with Civilian Projects’ Hemispheres collection carried hand-painted excerpts from the manifesto.
Across the Atlantic, the same argument arrived in Copenhagen for 3daysofdesign with How to Handle, an immersive installation developed with spatial set designer Currie Ritchie and Engstrom. Borrowing the visual language of manifestos and protest graphics, the space layered typography, tactile materials and interactive elements, presenting hardware not as a product display but as an environment to be used—opened, gripped, pressed.
Hardware as an Experience
The Streaks collection, designed with Yasmine Ghoniem of YSG Studio and launched at 3daysofdesign in 2025, anchored both presentations with characteristic swagger. The collection of banded timber levers, pulls and joinery pieces remains one of the most spirited things to happen to hardware in years.
Steve Bradley, co-CEO of Bankston, explained the goal of the project. “At its core, this exhibition is about reconnecting people with the physical experience of design—the feeling of opening a door, holding an object and interacting with material in a meaningful way,” he said. “For Scale immediately understood that ambition.”
It’s a fitting chapter for a brand that operates less like a hardware manufacturer and more like a design incubator, with each collection authored by a different studio in its own language. In an increasingly intangible world, Bankston made a compelling case for reaching out and holding on.
For the average person walking through a building, the constant requirement to open doors or adjust a shelf can feel like an endless series of interruptions, but this project suggests the friction is actually part of the experience. The physical act of gripping a handle or pulling a lever provides a moment of grounding in a space that might otherwise feel sterile, turning a routine movement into a deliberate interaction with the object itself.
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