Radios

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

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. 

Office Supplies

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!)

Audio players

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. 

Tea Kettles

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.)

Rulers

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.

Toys: “Play is Serious Business”

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. 

Game consoles

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.

Typewriters

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.

Lights 

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.

Writing implements

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. 

Notebooks and more

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. 

Material and shape

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. 

Old things

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.

Computers

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.

Sketches

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. 

Awards and recognition

Note here eBeam featuring in T3 magazine—a particular delight to Rafi, who always loved this gadget publication!

Connections

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. 

Small plaques

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.  

Translation of article on how Rafi and Etan were hired by Efi Arazi:

“...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.”

What is this thing?