Hidden in Plain Sight | Connected by Design

Every home has one. We’ve organised our lives around it and our interiors against it. rain’s 101 5G smart router range transforms that notion with hardworking hardware that earns respect and functional design that’s meant to be seen.

There’s an item in your home that you likely did not select. It’s probably monotone, usually plastic, and almost certainly hidden behind the television.

It’s also one of the most important objects in the house. The router is what makes everything work; streaming, working from home, and calling friends and family all over the world. It’s become the intangible layer that connects any contemporary home.

Earlier this year, rain commissioned ten artists and design studios selected by VISI to create new skins for their 101 5G smart router range. The result is a striking collection of interchangeable adhesive covers that let the router become the centrepiece of the room instead of awkwardly existing in it.

Applying depth to dimension

Three of the studios work primarily with ideas of depth. Through ceramic glaze, light, shadow, and reflections, each was challenged to bring their three-dimensional discipline onto flat vinyl.

Vitalli. Design’s Ryan Olivier put the difficulty plainly: his furniture communicates through tactility, form and presence, none of which survive the translation. He pulled back until rhythm and materiality could carry what texture normally would. Studio Kalki built depth back in, starting from their Fynbos-inspired patterning and adding translucent glazes to each waterjet-cut piece so the layering still reads.

Spectrum Mirror went the other way. Caitlin Warther and Wendy Dixon work with chromatic mirror surfaces that shift with the light and the angle and the person standing in front of them, a quality a printed skin cannot have. After several explorations, they photographed their own panels and used the images as the design. The solution goes back to the source material, and that instinct runs through the whole collection.

Pattern as memory

Where some studios set out to solve with surface tension, others treated the101 skin as somewhere to put a story.

Sipho Khwebula Twala combined Nigerian Nsibidi symbols with Nguni diamond patterns and shields landing on a design story that talks about a shared road, on a device built to close distance. Bonolo Chepape of Lulasclan started from the interior itself, describing homes as living archives of the pieces and memories that tell us who we are; her 101 skin holds a conversation with the objects around it rather than dominating them. Zinhle Sithebe’s Hold Space for Your Dreams puts hands around a heart with a sun at its centre as a constant reminder to “pour back into ourselves.”

Connected by design

Ten artists and design studios with one shared canvas. Connecting is what designers have always done: put the inner and outer world into functional relationship with each other and make it worth looking at.

The 101 range answers in kind. The point is not that a router becomes beautiful. It is that it becomes chosen. This collection asks something that’s hidden in plain sight: if the hardware delivering connectivity is going to live in your home, shouldn’t it look like it belongs there?

Win with rainOne unlimited

Stand a chance to win 12 months of rainOne unlimited: unlimited 5G home wifi and unlimited mobile, with the101 5G smart router and LoopPhone free-to-use. Only on rain. South Africa’s unlimited 5G network.

Ts & Cs apply.