An object at the intersection of a lot of Rafi’s interests were radios. If you stop to think about it, radios seem to be literally sorcery, finding invisible signals and receiving them, casting voices huge distances (or infinitely into space!) How did we come to understand that there was an invisible fabric of information all around us? How did we come to exploit it? And once we had, consider the transistor radio: a small, personal magic device, the first thing to turn the invisible audible, to make distance less relevant.
Sony released one of the first commercially successful transistor radios, the TR-63, in 1957. It was small enough to fit in a coat pocket, beautifully designed, and marketed brilliantly to American youth. This device helped establish Sony as a global brand and Japan as a leader in postwar technology design, two other facets Rafi found fascinating–how to build a company based on design and the drive and aesthetics of postwar Japan. Unlike the imposing, furniture-like radios of earlier decades, these were democratic and inviting, in many cases a Japanese projection of an American ideal. They carried the optimism of the space age and the aesthetics of modernism.
A transistor radio wasn't just a gadget—it was a symbol of a new era: youth independence, technological possibility, and design as a way of life. A Sony radio might have felt to Rafi like a small but perfect expression of what humanity could achieve: elegance, technological marvel, expanding human potential, and a symbol of human imagination, all wired into one.
Photo credits: Jenna Morgenstern-Gaines, Etan Rozin, Rama Marinov, Ari Holtzman, Efehan Kandemir, Lucas Rhee, Sofia Chow, Charles Uzell
Phones are another device that Rafi would have referred to as a technology indistinguishable from magic; fascinated by the history of communication, Rafi would point out the absurd change in the speed and range of communication, from smoke signals to letters to telegraphs to phones. To have a machine that fit in the palm of a hand with which you could talk to someone across the world–or even send them a video of your cat–is an unbelievable feat of human achievement.
These phones, most of them Rafi’s actually used devices, represent his fascination not just with the technology but its use–the form of the phone, the keyboard, the folding of the device to protect keys or make it more compact. In the cabinets to the side, scattered amongst the clocks, see less portable phones, including older models, which he loved for the variety and beauty of their designs.
To Rafi, no object was too small to deserve good design. A paperclip could be elegant or joyful. A tape dispenser could surprise you. The workspace didn’t just have to be utilitarian—it could be a playground of form and function, a daily landscape of tiny delights. Tools were invitations to designers to think differently. For example, the kaleidoscope of scissors you see here, while they all have a simple purpose to cut paper, each solve slightly different problems: portability, ease of use, storage, comfort, adaptability, durability, etc. Rafi believed the ordinary deserved attention, and that beauty and intelligence could—and should—show up anywhere, even in a drawer labeled “misc.” (Maybe especially in that drawer!)
First we learned to record vision–drawing on cave walls, etching into rock, painting, discovering perspective, eventually inventing cameras–but it took another approximately 40,000 years before we managed to record our next sense, sound. (Or, if the camera is your metric, it took about 40-50–still a while!) The idea that you could take a sense so ephemeral, transient and invisible and trap it, capture it in physical, replayable, preservable, ownable form was extraordinary. Part of this enchantment was conceptual—Rafi was fascinated when something dynamic could be transformed into a static object. It didn’t seem like it should be something the universe allowed, but people did it anyway. Equally enchanting were the technological revelations that enabled this, from wax cylinders to bone-conducting headphones, spinning cylinders, etched discs, magnetic tape, flash memory. Each innovation made designers rethink size, shape, portability, interface. Was it meant for a pocket, a living room, a jog through the park? How sleek, how fun, how elegant could you make it?
Rafi loved music, and was disappointed he didn’t learn an instrument in his youth. He would often be found humming lines from Leonard Cohen, Jesus Christ Superstar, the Doors, or Joni Mitchell. His best friend, Etan, remembers the hours upon hours they spent just listening to music together in their teenage years, and how extraordinary it was to have the room filled with sound from far away. Audio devices were yet another facet of Rafi’s belief that what technology and design allowed us to do was make magic real.
Rafi appreciated the engineering, elegant and the whimsy—gears ticking beneath glass, faces that turn time into something visual or poetic, and all in portable, wearable form. Watches are a great playground for a designer–constrained by comfort and the need for instant readability, the designer can rise to the challenge of using design language and stretching the limits of shape, material, and symbol.
Rafi loved that a famous designer like Michael Graves, who worked with high-end design groups such as the famous Italian Memphis group and Alessi design studios (you can see an exhibit of Alessi products in this room) also provided quality but affordable design for the masses, to be sold at J.C. Penny and Target. Not only did Rafi love his signature style, but he also loved the idea that design could be truly accessible to all, beautiful, useful, and elegant–and bought at Target next to detergent and towels.
Clocks, like watches, can be a playground for a designer, but unlike watches, they aren’t constrained by portability or form factor or expected to have the same ease of use. Thus they can show time in a more expansively creative and innovative way. Rafi collected clocks that flip, use pins, rotate, or stack–a safari of possibilities.
Alessi’s work represented what Rafi valued most in design: intelligence, joy, and the belief that even everyday objects could surprise you. Their designs were proof that usefulness and delight didn’t have to be opposites. A well-designed object could do its job beautifully, elegantly, and still make you smile. That balance—of function and feeling, refinement and play—is what made Alessi a favorite of Rafi’s.
For Rafi, a teapot was the perfect design challenge: it had to pour well, hold heat, feel good in the hand—and still leave room for charm. Most of the teapots here are by Alessi or Michael Graves, designers who shared his belief that function and whimsy could go hand in hand (exhibits of Alessi and Michael Graves can be seen elsewhere in this room). These are teapots that whistle with birds, that wear bright colors and bold shapes, that turn the act of boiling water into an act of art. (Rafi also enjoyed the quiet inside joke that the teapot—so often reimagined by designers—was famously used as a standard modeling challenge in the early days of computer graphics.)
The theme of this room–the triangulation between elegance, humor, and problem-solving–is well-represented in this set of objects. Design lies in the range between taking an object of waste-disposal, like an ashtray, and making it stunningly beautiful–to taking a utilitarian tool like a garlic-crusher and making it absolutely adorable. Even the parade of salt and pepper shakers, a collection acquired by Rafi for Shlomit, are a display for elegance and comedy in different proportions. There is no object too small to be designed, these objects say, and no human need that cannot be made beautiful (we didn’t bring the Michael Graves toilet brushes from our house, you’re welcome.)
Rafi liked to point out that one of the extraordinary acts of early humanity was inventing the concept of the standard unit of measure. In doing so, humans made things comparable, quantifiable, and understandable in extraordinary ways; they gave structure to human knowledge and laid the foundation for building, learning, and reasoning.
This table is full of tools that reflect that impulse to both evaluate and calculate. These objects made precision portable, and their forms revealed the problems they were built to solve. But to Rafi measurement was not just technical—it was a philosophical act, a human attempt to bridge the known and the unknown, to get a little closer to understanding reality.
Some Rafi-recommended reading (especially the audiobook!): The Perfectionists, by Simon Winchester.
Rafi loved tools in all their forms, in the broadest definition: multitools packed with possibility, navigational compasses that used the magnetic pull of the poles, lighters that harnessed fire, even well-designed keychains as containers for other tools. Each tool is a solution to a specific problem, but also a marvel of the human extension of ourselves: a way humans have figured out how to shape, build, alter, enhance the world and our own capabilities.
Rafi saw in toys not just fun or distraction, but a blueprint for education: how we come to understand systems, patterns, ourselves, how things work, how we can impact things—and how we build the skills to imagine something new. Some of these toys are nostalgic, like the robot toy Rafi remembered yearning for in his youth, others beautifully reimagined, like the invisible playing cards. All reflect the idea that play trains the mind to notice, to wonder, to try again, to try differently, to practice skills through fun.
More Rafi-recommended reading: Rafi often returned to the book Inventing Kindergarten, which traced how design, movement, and play shaped the foundations of modern education, a cornerstone of his belief that education was play, and play education.
In consoles, Rafi saw a meeting point of many of his interests: human-computer interaction, elegant design, the joy of problem-solving, and the belief that learning is most powerful when it feels like play. From pixelated adventures to virtual pets, these devices bridged his love of play with his deep interest in computers, design, and immersive technology.
Toys train the mind to wonder, consoles train it to engage—strategically, spatially, narratively. Rafi loved how they reflected the evolution of computing itself, from the simple games of early handhelds to the rich complexity of later platforms. He often spoke about The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson’s novel about a child who learns through an interactive book—a vision of education that is playful, intelligent, and alive with possibility. With the advent of AI—a field in which his son Ari is now a professor—the possibility of combining the game with a truly personalized learning tool seemed ever more possible, and exciting.
From the elegant curves of early 1900s models to the punchy modernism of the Olivetti Valentine, from index machines like the Mignon to sleek electric keyboards of the 1980s, each of these typewriters reflects a different technical and aesthetic answer to the same question of putting type to page. The revelation of the typewriter, Rafi would point out, was that the English alphabet made immeasurable combinations using so few symbols; a Chinese typewriter (which exist, and are differently beautiful) would necessarily be different because of the enormous amount of pictographic words.
Rafi also loved that typewriters, like calculators, were precursors to the computer–part of humanity’s evolving technological capability in mechanism and machine, in service of human creation.
Some of these gadgets are new; some are older than they look. What connects them isn’t their age, but their ambition. These are devices built not just to solve problems, but to imagine different ways of living—tools that stretch the interface between human and machine. Each gadget here is a kind of thought experiment made real, a physical answer to the question: what else might be possible?
Rafi loved science fiction and speculative engineering, not just for the novelty but for the humanness of testing limits and then seeing what happens, of imagination meeting the future and altering it in unpredictable ways.
Each calculator on this table—mechanical, analog, digital—represents a different solution to the challenge of turning thought into arithmetic. Like the table of rulers, calculators are the next step in taking the world from measurable to computable–and like typewriters, calculators are another branch of the stream that makes the invention of the true computer possible. Rafi appreciated them as design objects, too: the beauty of the buttons, the heft of a well-balanced tool, the difference between a calculator built for speed or durability and one built for style. They were quiet marvels of engineering—distillations of logic and possibility in handheld form.
Flashlights, lanterns, tiny penlights— all these were expressions of ingenuity to Rafi: portable answers to the problem of darkness, each with its own design logic. He enjoyed the way form, function, aesthetics–all the variables of design would show up in shoelace lights or a camping flashlight.
Like all the other collections here, these show Rafi’s love of the variety of answers to a design question like how to control the chaos of cables, the nuance of different shades of answers to that question. Rafi had an intense fascination with objects that set the tone for how you should interact with something in your life, and great love for things that made something previously painful into an opportunity for beauty.
What’s in a writing implement? Rafi’s love of writing and drawing is visible throughout this exhibition, but in order to do as he did, one needs the pen and pencil–and what marvels of engineering these are, what unbelievable ingenuity in what tiny packages, what slim vessels for infinite designs. Rafi loved pens and pencils—not fancy ones, necessarily, but excellent ones–with the love of both a designer and a constant drawer and notetaker—the feel, the look, the material, the mark, the weight, the texture, the mechanism.
Rafi’s love of pens tagged along with a love of paper—and especially of notebooks. Design, practicality, texture, smoothness, size, grids, dots, stencils, page numbers, etc.—every feature changes the nature of a notebook, and makes it useful and usable for a different purpose.
Seen here too are selections from some of Rafi’s other collections: erasers, colored writing implement sets, and sharpners—everything you need to think by drawing. The rainbows of markers and Darwinian variety of erasers show Rafi’s interest in small variations making a totally different product and opening different possibilities for use.
As a designer and someone fascinated by the history of technology, Rafi thought a lot about material, from material in its natural state to how we humans use it. He bought Lee a manta-ray skin as a birthday present once, marveling at its tiny glue-like dots and how they allowed them to glide in the water more smoothly. He would often mention that when designing it was worth thinking about what materials look better as they age with use, like metal and wood, like the pencil we show here from his favorite Faber Castell. He was fascinated by glass-blowing, by the possibilities of paper and the cleverness of objects of solid width.
Rafi taught the History of Technology course at Nueva with his daughter, Lee. He would often bring in objects from this collection: objects from the history of science and daily life, from razors to field microscopes, thermometers and Victorian binoculars. He loved these objects for every aspect of them: for the way the represented the abilities, limitations, aesthetics, and concerns of the past and illuminated the flow of history, for the cleverness of people of the past, for the technical prowess.
Rafi was computer-crazy before most people had even really grasped how transformative computers would be. As a young man in Jerusalem, he and his best friend Etan taught themselves how computers worked and how to use them long before formal instruction was common. They bought the Sinclair ZX80 computer kit and put it together themselves, the ZX81, then Apple IIs.
Says Etan: “We were really on the bleeding edge and willing to suffer for it. Hours of entering code. One of us would read it out loud from a geek magazine. The other would type. Just to get a tiny, stupid program running. When it did…we were amazed. The computer would not retain the program when it was shut down, so if we wanted to run the program again…it all had to be repeated. And…every keypress on the ZX80 would flash and refresh the entire screen. It is a wonder no seizures were involved.”
They were far ahead of the curve and while still students at Betzalel Academy, they were tasked with putting together the first computer lab for design, which they did and started teaching a course in using it. They also taught a design studio that continued past their graduation.
This collection reflects some of that lifelong fascination. Rafi considered the computer the apex of human technology not just because it was so ubiquitous but because he saw how it brought together so many other strands of human technological exploration—calculation, measurement, image capturing and processing, sound, writing, display, creation—all through simple binary logic gates.
Right out of Betzalel, Rafi and his best friend, Etan, set up their own design studio. They combined their love of design with computers’ capabilities to explore a new frontier. Among other things, they collaborated with the head of the Industrial Design department from Betzalel, Shmuel Kaplan, to design a command vehicle for use by the army, created packaging for typewriter ribbon, wrote computer software, designed trade show exhibits, a computer store with two branches (the exhibits and interior), and computer enclosures, infographics and signage for Motorola, branding for a new TV network, and design and implementation of fonts for Brother dot matrix printers (at the time, the fonts were built into the printers).
Rafi’s best friend, Etan, went to a demo for Scitex, the biggest hi-tech company in Israel at the time, and told Rafi they had to try to be part of this new world. They saw an ad looking for computer application engineers at Scitex and after some discussion, they decided that despite their enjoyment of their own work, they wanted to be a part of this new brave world, applied and were accepted. After a few months working there, when the company was looking for designers for a new product line, they applied for that particular project and were vetted by Efi Arazi, the CEO of the company–a signal of his investment in the project, but also the beginning of his support of their work. They designed 11 new products in the course of just a few months, traveling to Düsseldorf, Germany, to set them up and be present for the duration of the show. Efi held up a promise they had wrangled from him when they applied for the product line competition, and they were promoted to heads of the design department instead of application engineers.
Efi Arazi moved to the US and founded a new company, Electronics for Imaging. One day he called Rafi and asked “so, when are you coming over?” Thus Rafi moved to the US, and as EFI’s designer he designed the user interface for the famous Cachet color editing software and was part of the team for the Fiery print servers. Eventually he was put in charge of the eBeam product line, an electronic whiteboard system, which Rafi then spun off into its own company, Luidia, with EFI as an investor. At Luidia he took on the role of CEO, and expanded his passion for product design to include the entire business enterprise.
These are some of the projects Rafi designed while a student at Betzalel Academy of Art and Design. You can see through these Rafi’s varied interests and expansive mind. See if you can spot a picture of Shlomit as a student in Betzalel as well!
These are an array of portraits of Rafi from a variety of people, showing some of his various facets – from a quick sketch of him by an anonymous fellow soldier when he was stationed in Lebanon, to a portrait done in memoriam by Ryan Saunders, who worked with him at PocketRN. Other sketches include a symbolic portrait by the great Elinoar Almagor, a childhood drawing by his daughter, a drawing by Alejandra Anton (a beloved graphic designer who worked with him at Luidia), a bumper sticker capturing Rafi’s love of dogs by the incomparable designer Brad Richter who also worked with him at Luidia and a caricature by Gilad, a fellow student at the university
Rafi often alluded to the idea of thinking by drawing–obsessed with the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and Thinking in Pencil (and thus started his daughter's drawing career). Rafi drew and took notes constantly since his days in Betzalel, understanding that capturing the idea and the “aha” moment, or getting to an idea through iteration, could often happen best in the unpixelated, freeform format of paper.
To Rafi a camera could rival a computer as the epitome of technical achievement and humanity’s innovativeness. The history of cameras is a confluence of so many kinds of scientific and technical understanding: the chemical knowledge needed for the first captured images, optics and lenses, mechanical knowledge, the advent of the digital–and the many technical questions of capturing images, from buttons to speed, accuracy, correction, light adjustment, lens, focus, light, etc. In the end, a camera was an object unto itself–an unbelievable work of engineering–but also a means to trap memory in previously unimaginable ways. While a subject could sit for a painting and have their likeness captured, cameras allowed us to see things that had never been seen before: they revealed the structure of a drop of water mid-fall, the blur of a hummingbird’s wings, the structure of snowflakes, and captured expressions too fleeting for the eye to hold.
We’ve gathered some of Rafi’s favorite objects and recurring themes as a symbolic representation of his workspace: books from his bedside table, the astrolabe gifted by the History of Tech class he co-taught, a flying pig, pens, watches, tools, clever erasers, magnets, sketches, and his beloved Curta calculator—an astonishing device designed by Curt Herzstark while imprisoned in a concentration camp. Each item is very Rafi to us.
Note here eBeam featuring in T3 magazine—a particular delight to Rafi, who always loved this gadget publication!
Rafi inspired and connected to so many people throughout his life; he had a genuine gift in making people feel appreciated and adored for their finest traits, and his deep admiration (mixed with loving teasing) could make one feel able to be the best version of oneself. This was his mentorship. Here we’ve gathered photos of Rafi with many of the people who impacted his life and who he cherished and impacted in turn. May we all carry his bemused, delighted joy in us with us into the world.
Rafi often quoted Arthur C. Clarke, saying that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He would argue, however, that we think this magic always lies in the future, when in fact our technology already is magic–that we have learned to manipulate the electro-magnetic spectrum and send waves infinite distance or power tiny lights from miles away, to split the atom, to gene-edit glowing rabbits, to send cat videos from one end of the earth to the other with a short stop in space. We’ve laid down cables across the ocean floor, sent man to the moon, and can artificially create diamonds–really just scientific versions of teleportation, witchcraft, and alchemy.
Moreso, he would argue that the world itself is magic–the inconceivable complexity of life and organic bodies, despite their frailty, the human mind that somehow produces consciousness, and magnets. “I mean, that’s just magic,” Rafi would say about magnets. And it’s true–we technically know how magnets work but like only sort of? This thing on every fridge in the world has mysterious strength and attraction to itself, to the North Pole, to the spin of the Earth. What?! That’s crazy!
Rafi always wanted this toy (the “smoking robot”) when he was young, and bought himself two when he grew up. He loved the science fiction optimism that was present in his youth—watching the moon landing at age 13, he would say he knew soon we’d be living on the Moon.
Yes, this is a rubber stamp and you can make the face happy, sad, angry, etc!
Can you tell Rafi loved bunnies?
Rafi would keep antique watches to make into art or take apart. Note one of these has Hebrew letters as the numbers!
These are Arne Jacobsen ashtrays, a famous design that allowed you to flip the ash (or pistachio shells, or pits) into the lower compartment to reduce odor–simple elegance for a trash receptacle.
This is a tiny pillbox! You squish the flap up and down to “lock” the pills in.
I’m a squeegee!
I’m also a crank-powered flashlight on the bottom!
I’m a timer!
We’re shoelace lights.
I’m a face you can squish to make me angry, sad, happy, etc.
I’m a paper fold-up flashlight.
Etan and Rafi received this as a gift from one of their first official jobs.
“...But the French designer’s sketches did not meet the CEO’s requirements. Arazi, who knew exactly what he wanted, decided to bet on someone as young and Israeli as possible. Since he didn’t know who to turn to, he tasked his office with contacting all the graduates of the Betzalel design program of recent years and invite them for interviews. Within two days, two young men showed up at his office and announced that they were already working at Scitex—as instructors. Etan Rozin and Rafi Holtzman graduated from Betzalel and dreamed of designing computers, but jobs of this sort don’t just fall out of the blue. The two decided to close the design studio they had opened together after finishing their studies, and enter the industry that attracted them through the backdoor. They trained themselves in a course at the Scitex factories in Herzliya and started working. Now Efi has invited them to design seven new products in six months.”