This article is part of our latest Design special report, which is about crossing the borders of space, time and media.

When Heather Kane was scouring her favorite London neighborhoods two years ago searching for an apartment to buy, she discovered a promising candidate on the first floor of an 18th-century townhouse on Harley Street, in the Marylebone area of the city center.

“I loved it,” recalled Ms. Kane, a 42-year-old technology executive turned design entrepreneur, who was born in Los Angeles and has lived in London since 2015. “Most of the apartments I’d seen had beautiful, original facades but were too pared back inside. This one was huge with high windows and ceilings, original plaster moldings, and an amazing terrace.

“I love London’s historic architecture and wanted to preserve as much of the period detailing as possible. I thought it would be an easy conversion, but it turned out to be 10 times harder than anything I’d done before.”

The cause of her difficulties was Britain’s labyrinthine architectural conservation system, which ensures that any changes to a building deemed to be of historic importance, like the Harley Street townhouse, must be approved by the local planning department. Ms. Kane’s home is in the City of Westminster, which includes some of London’s finest historical buildings, but whose planners are famed for their strictness and for having very particular opinions on what constitutes acceptable — and unacceptable —— architectural interventions.

Translating such a building into a comfortable, functional contemporary home is almost always intensely subjective and potentially contentious. One person’s interpretation of sensitive restoration can be another’s idea of architectural carnage, while a third might regard it as too timid. As Ms. Kane admitted, one of her challenges in navigating British conservation politics was having no knowledge of the planning system. Another problem was the difficulty of translating her needs and wishes into something that Westminster’s planners would approve.

Like much of Marylebone, Harley Street originated as a speculative development by the Portland Estate, owned by the Duke of Portland, whose wife inherited most of the land between what are now Oxford Street and Marylebone Road, in 1741. Harley Street’s construction began in the 1750s, and the house containing Ms. Kane’s apartment was designed and built from 1773 to 1774 by one of the estate’s surveyors, John White, and Thomas Collins, a sought-after ornamental plasterer.

Grander houses were built nearby at that time — notably those designed by the Scottish architects Robert and James Adam on Mansfield Street — but the delicately rendered cherubs in Collins’s plasterwork would have been enough to distinguish this one. His renown may also explain why several of his ornate panels survived nearly 250 years of construction, including the house’s conversion in 1949 into flats. Collins’s skill also contributed to the entire house’s being given a Grade 2 listing, which is awarded to a building “of special interest, warranting every effort to preserve it,” in 1987.

Like many London apartments of similar vintage, Ms. Kane’s two-bedroom, first-floor flat combined some original elements with a motley assortment of additions dating from the early and mid-1800s, early 1900s, the 1949 conversion, and subsequent makeovers. Westminster’s planners insisted that all of those features be preserved and that any adjacent work match them. Ms. Kane was happy with that, but not with the planners’ response to her request for what she thought were modest changes to make her new home “more livable,” as she put it.

When she bought the apartment, Ms. Kane contacted Red Deer, a group of young architects who had designed the interior of one of her favorite London restaurants, Bourne & Hollingsworth Buildings in Clerkenwell. “It has a tumbledown historic feel, a little bit deconstructed, and I wanted a similar aesthetic,” she explained.

Together with Red Deer’s co-founder, Lionel Real de Azúa, she formulated a proposal to restore Collins’s panels and other historic detailing, while modifying the apartment’s layout, principally by relocating the kitchen to create a large open-plan space for entertaining, eating and cooking, and reconfiguring other areas to accommodate two bathrooms, rather than one. They also hoped to improve the insulation by installing thicker glass in the windows and an additional layer of floorboards and asked Westminster’s planners for permission to proceed.

“They came back with ‘no,’ without explaining why,” Ms. Kane said. “I ended up hiring a lawyer, and three sets of heritage experts. As soon as the third one, Kit Wedd of Spurstone Heritage, came in, things were smoothed out. Kit was an angel. If we’d had her in the beginning, I’d have got nine months of my life back.”

Even so, some of their proposals were rejected. The changes to the layout were approved, but not the thicker glass and floors. Ms. Wedd also worked with Red Deer to identify which aspects of the interior were authentic. “There had been so much work on the building that it would be very hard to distill it into a particular style,” said Mr. Real de Azúa. “The floor was a hodgepodge of pine, Douglas fir, oak and plywood. We discovered that the Douglas fir boards were original, so we found new boards to match and stripped everything else out.”

Similar principles were applied to the fireplaces, ceiling moldings and joinery. Some areas were so damaged that Red Deer had to improvise, for example by painting part of the guest bedroom wall gray to disguise the repaired plaster. As Ms. Kane is an avid collector of art and furniture with eclectic taste, they chose a palette of white, black and gray to create a neutral backdrop for her auction and flea market finds from different periods and cultures. She then created clusters of favorite pieces throughout the apartment, such as a 1956 Charles and Ray Eames lounge chair placed near a 19th-century landscape painting and an antique rug from Frances Loom, a vintage furniture company she co-owns, in the living area.

“I enjoy picking up things I like and mixing them up,” Ms. Kane said. “I loved doing that for the apartment, and I love living here. But I wouldn’t buy a listed building ever again.”

This article is part of our latest Design special report, which is about crossing the borders of space, time and media.

Back to the Ether

Sight Unseen’s latest design show takes place where it all began.

Nearly every May since 2010 the online design magazine Sight Unseen has held an exhibition in New York presenting the work of up-and-coming creators. The event has always been scheduled to coincide with the International Contemporary Furniture Fair and thus take advantage of all the retail buyers and interior designers in the city at that time. This year, of course, the coronavirus upended everyone’s plans.

“For us, it was a no-brainer,” said Monica Khemsurov, who co-founded the site with Jill Singer.

To promote sales, the partners set up a digital storefront on 1stdibs where some of the new furniture, lighting and rugs can be bought. And though you can’t meet the designers face-to-face this year you can at least hear them — on audio clips in which the designers talk about their new wares.

They talk to each other, too. In an afternoon series on Instagram Live — 2 p.m. daily the first week of June — exhibitors compare notes. On June 1 catch Kalen Kaminski (of Upstate) and Leah Ring (Another Human) discussing their recent forays into glasswork. The next day Brett Miller (Jack Rabbit Studio) and Christopher Norman ponder contemporary woodworking — a big trend this year. And on June 5 Mike Ruiz-Serra (Serra Studio) and Hannah Bigeleisen share the thrills of experimenting with paper pulp. Sightunseen.com

Ravaged Beauty for Your Home

A new wall covering creates an instant look of disaster.

Shuttered businesses, job losses and relationships under duress — the world may seem to be falling apart as a result of the coronavirus. Turns out there’s a wallpaper for that.

The artist Daniel Arsham, a co-founder of the design studio Snarkitecture, has collaborated with Calico Wallpaper on a trompe l’oeil wall covering that will make a room look like it is crumbing away.

“Erosions” is based on a mural Mr. Arsham and Calico created for a gallery show in 2018. To achieve it, the artist made castings of eroded surfaces; then the company used a scanning process to digitize the works. Gallery goers loved the one-off piece, and now Calico is printing the design on clay-coated paper for use in residences.

While the wall covering appears to depict wreckage, it may have a hopeful message: The faux gouges contain crystals, “which we associate with growth,” said Mr. Arsham, speaking from his weekend house on Long Island where he has hunkered down with his wife and children.

“There’s an ambiguity,” he added. “Are things falling apart or are they growing to some kind of completion?” calicowallpaper.com. $28 a square foot.

Pull Up a Seat, and a Frequency

A prototype chair may have a future in telecommunications.

When the conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll carried a low chair with a pole back and outstretched arms to Hudson River Park in New York for a photo shoot recently, a passer-by asked, “Is it a piece of sculpture?”

In fact, her Tower Chair is a provocation — about control of digital air space; it is also the prototype for a design she said she believed could one day be put into production, yielding seats that double as hot spots.

The chair, part of a broader inquiry named Public Utility 2.0, evolved from a commissioned work for a contemporary art exhibition in 2013. With that project, Ms. Carroll — whose art touches on technology and public policy — sought to educate people about the idle radio frequencies of old television channels and how they could be put to use connecting underserved communities.

“It’s public space,” she said, speaking of the invisible but mapped properties, which can host a variety of transmissions. “It should be utilized for the public good.”

Her three-leg chair, fittingly, has a form that evokes telephone towers, which support wiring for remote communications. It is made of solid wood and slicked with rubber paint applied in an auto body shop.

But when the chair is put into production, Ms. Carroll, the founder of MEC, studios, envisions hollow parts that could house wiring for receiving and transmitting signals. Thus equipped, a seat could become a piece of portable infrastructure enabling someone in a Wi-Fi desert to log on while lounging.

Light in the Middle of the Tunnel

Can a lamp help relieve the gloom of the pandemic?

If the lockdown has you bored with your décor, maybe your lamps just aren’t working hard enough. The Space Table Lamp, designed by Ward Wijnant, functions as a fun-house mirror, reflecting and distorting its surroundings — and that’s when it’s off. When the thing is on, it flashes disco lights. Is it a lamp? A piece of kinetic sculpture? “It’s something in between,” said Mr. Wijnant, speaking by phone from his home in the Netherlands.

Stainless-steel clips hold together the arched pieces of plexiglass that make the lamp’s sides. Those silvery panels turn translucent when the light is switched on, revealing the bulbs within.

The Space Table Lamp belongs in that strange universe of objects — like mood rings and lava lamps — whose fascination lies in the way they change based on our interaction with them. In these terrible times, the design is “a release of joy,” Mr. Wijnant said.

It is not, however, a functional lamp that sheds light the way ordinary fixtures do. Don’t expect to read a book by it. $1,569, moooi.com

Getting Into Hot Water

A tabletop collection grows out of a cuppa.

Four years ago, Michael McManus and Matthew Grant were post-college housemates in London when they began kicking around the idea of renting a studio and making something with their hands. Mr. McManus had studied fine art, Mr. Grant had a degree in architecture, and both were intrigued with the possibilities of forms based on the ancient art of origami.

Now they have a collection of vases, coasters and planters that embody the tension between the fragility of folded paper and the solidity of functional objects. Their wares also incorporate a surprising ingredient: the soggy remains of tea bags.

A commitment to making sustainable products led the partners to explore adding food waste to the nontoxic gypsum-based binder they use to cast their designs. They tried crushed eggshells, coffee grounds and fruit peelings before hitting on something in abundance in their country of tea drinkers.

“One of the reasons we settled on tea is that it has an aesthetic quality we like,” Mr. McManus said. “The natural pigments come through.”

Chamomile yields off-white, peppermint blue-green and rooibos ochre.

The partners collect tea bags from cafes, dry the leaves in a dehydrator, then crush them before adding to the binder. The process informed the name of their endeavor: Dust London.

“A lot of what we are experimenting with,” Mr. Grant said, “is taking a material that had been used and breaking it down and finding a way to reuse it and make it beautiful again.”

This article is part of our latest Design special report, which is about crossing the borders of space, time and media.

Despite all the advances in electronic commerce, many furniture sales remain an old-fashioned affair, completed in person.

Because sofas and lounge chairs tend to be expensive, unwieldy and difficult to return, it has always been reassuring to flop down in a potential purchase for a comfort check — and to ask a sales associate for advice — before unsheathing the credit card.

The arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, however, changed everything. Within days of closing their stores, many furniture companies took a big digital step by putting robust virtual interior design services front and center.

Arhaus, BoConcept, Design Within Reach, Ethan Allen, Frette, Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, Parachute, Restoration Hardware, and West Elm, among many others, began promoting personalized, one-on-one interior design sessions delivered via videoconference and online chat, for free.

And many consumers, suddenly living life through Zoom, took them up on it, inviting the retailers into their homes through a smartphone lens.

David Cherry, a business technology analyst at Google in Boulder, Colo., who recently moved from a one-bedroom apartment into a three-bedroom house, needed help furnishing his new space.

“There was a certain section of my living room that was just a weird space I didn’t know what to do with,” said Mr. Cherry, 36. He thought about hiring an interior designer, but figured no one would be willing to visit his house with the coronavirus circulating in Colorado.

“So I decided to just guess, and pick something,” he said.

When he visited West Elm’s website, however, he noticed the availability of an online design chat. Skeptical, but with nothing to lose, he asked for help designing his living room.

“I went into it thinking, ‘If I get involved in this chat, they’re probably just going to try to sell me all this furniture,’” he said.

But he found the designer he was connected with to be genuinely helpful and willing to work around his existing furniture.

“It was really cool because they ask you questions around what your current lifestyle is like,” he said. “They actually really cared about the space.”

A few chat messages led to numerous sessions in which Mr. Cherry shared videos and photos of his home, and West Elm’s designers suggested floor plans with central products, which they later discussed by phone.

In the end, Mr. Cherry ordered a dining table with a bench, a coffee table, a console table, bookcase and a leather swivel chair.

Laura Wilson, the manager of design services at West Elm, said the size of the resulting order was of little concern. The company’s designers are happy to troubleshoot a single rug, “or it can be soup-to-nuts, top-to-bottom everything in that room,” she said. “We just want to make it accessible, convenient and easy for every customer to get that expert advice.”

There is a very good chance that Mr. Cherry’s experience is about to become the new normal in full-service furniture sales, even as stay-home orders are eased and lifted.

“The furniture market was already moving online,” said Emily Miller, a partner at the management consulting firm Bain & Company. “Furniture market sales online have been growing almost 20 percent a year for the last couple of years, and that’s within a broader furniture market that’s only been growing about 2 to 3 percent.”

The challenge, however, is that “furniture is a big purchase that feels relatively risky,” Ms. Miller said. “For a lot of people, it’s something they do relatively infrequently and that makes the barrier to entry relatively high. It’s typically a slightly more consultative purchase.”

She pointed to the growth of affordable online interior design services such as Havenly, Modsy and Decorist as proof. “Those services have demonstrated that there is a real demand from consumers for help with interior design, and that they’re actually really happy to get that help digitally,” she said.

Furniture retailers were already experimenting with tools for virtual design consultations. The pandemic just created an increased sense of urgency.

Design Within Reach, for instance, began a pilot project for virtual design services provided by a few employees in February. But in March, when the spread of the coronavirus was declared a pandemic, the company pushed ahead with a full-scale rollout.

Before, dwr.com had a limited chat function focused on providing basic answers to simple questions, such as queries about product dimensions and materials.

The new chat is an immersive, personalized experience in which customers and employees share photos and engage in videoconferences to design whole rooms, which sometimes leads to presentations of three-dimensional renderings.

“We’re using video to see customer spaces and resolve their problems,” said Debbie Propst, the president of retail at Herman Miller, which owns Design Within Reach. “This is something we were planning on doing regardless of the current situation. But I will say that the current situation is driving new customer behavior. People are being forced to make furnishings decisions they may not otherwise have done without physically seeing the product.”

The Design Within Reach service pairs customers with a local sales associate, based on their internet connection. The idea is that online introductions may eventually become long-term relationships. Once stores reopen, sales associates can host video-based store tours for customers, or schedule in-person meetings.

Customers who use the chat function are 10 times more likely to make an online purchase than those who don’t, “and our average order value is about 25 percent higher,” Ms. Propst said. She added, “We’re seeing the highest success when the photo-sharing and video-chat functionalities are used.”

At most retailers, regular return policies still apply if some items do not work out. Returned items are cleaned and in some cases isolated for a period.

Companies focused on bedding and bath accessories, including Parachute and Frette, have started similar services.

Through a videoconference or phone call after customers answer preliminary questions online and share photos of their rooms, “we answer questions and talk through what types of products might work for whatever they’re looking for,” said Ariel Kaye, the founder and chief executive of Parachute. “And then we follow up with a curated mood board.”

The mood boards have inspirational images as well as specific product images that offer a color palette and guidance on how pieces can be mixed and matched within a room.

“Once our team is back in the office, we’re going to create an environment where they have all the products, so on these video calls, we can actually be showing products, like a mini store experience,” Ms. Kaye said.

Of course, some homeowners may feel that inviting a sales professional into their home through a video stream is just as intrusive as doing so through the front door.

When the ultimate goal is to make a sale, how can you trust a designer’s advice?

Mr. Cherry, at least, was surprised at how little pressure he felt from West Elm’s designers. They even told him not to buy certain things — like when he asked if he needed an ottoman to go with his swivel chair, or if he should add a few decorative accessories.

“That got me to trust them a little more,” he said.

Stacey DonFrancesco, a physician specializing in plastic and reconstructive surgery, had a similarly relaxed experience when she asked for virtual design help from Arhaus to design a new office at her home in Malvern, Pa.

Before the pandemic, Ms. DonFrancesco had invited Patricia DiLullo, an interior designer from her local Arhaus store, into her house to design the living room and master bedroom.

“I told her I wanted furniture, décor, everything,” said Ms. DonFrancesco, 35. “What was so fabulous about her was that she actually incorporated some of the pieces we already had.”

Ms. DonFrancesco said that Ms. DiLullo also seemed to put as much care into selecting paint colors, which Arhaus does not sell, as she did the furniture.

So when Ms. DonFrancesco needed to design a home office for videoconferences with patients in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, she turned to Ms. DiLullo for help once again — but this time through text message.

Ms. DiLullo created a mood board, Ms. DonFrancesco deleted some suggested artwork to replace with her framed professional certificates, and they explored color options for the walls before placing the order for furniture and accessories.

That high level of service, delivered almost instantaneously, is unlikely to disappear when the coronavirus is eventually brought under control, said Ms. Miller at Bain & Company.

“This experience, right now,” she said, “is going to permanently shift the way consumers buy online.”

This article is part of our latest Design special report, which is about crossing the borders of space, time and media.

The French archaeologist and statesman Théodore Reinach spent his family’s banking inheritance to live in exotic magnificence. In the early 1900s, he commissioned a house on a French Riviera peninsula with rooms frescoed in sea creatures and mosaicked with deities — all based on ancient buildings that he had documented on Delos island in Greece.

Mr. Reinach’s property, Villa Kérylos, has been open for decades (in nonpandemic times) as a museum in Beaulieu-sur-Mer near Nice. In recent years, it has also served as a muse for the writer and historian Adrien Goetz. His novel, “Villa of Delirium” (New Vessel Press), blends fictitious characters’ experiences at the Reinach estate with historically accurate descriptions of the building’s evolution and the occupants’ accomplishments and fates.

Mr. Goetz said in an interview that during a 2012 conference at the house, he was transfixed by “so much beauty, elegance, perfection there — it is a pinnacle of architectural intelligence.”

He tried to imagine what Mr. Reinach and his family’s daily lives were like as they straddled worlds by the sea. They were immersed in contemporary politics; they were Jewish and publicly battled against France’s growing anti-Semitism. And yet they surrounded themselves with cohesive décor harking back millenniums, “an homage to Greek thought translated into the very stones,” Mr. Goetz said.

The book is framed as a memoir written in 1956 by Achilles Leccia, an abstract painter in his late 60s from a working-class background. Mr. Goetz said the character was imaginary. Mr. Leccia had been sent as an uneducated but impressionable teenager to live and study with the Reinachs, while the villa was under construction.

His 1956 self, a nostalgic grandfather, returns to his now-decrepit childhood haunts while remembering his married mistress from the 1910s and searching for a lost imperial treasure (no plot spoilers here). His notebook fills with hastily scrawled comparisons of his youthful perspective and the dark secrets that he later learned.

Théodore and his wife, Fanny — in real life, and in Mr. Goetz/Leccia’s telling — lived near equally privileged relatives from the Ephrussi and Rothschild families, who built a pink Florentine palazzo on their patch of Mediterranean waterfront. The engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose nearby Italianate house is wreathed in balconies, traveled in the same cultured circles as the Villa Kérylos’s Jewish architect, Emmanuel Pontremoli.

Mr. Leccia remembers taking drawing lessons from Mr. Eiffel and delightedly watching Mr. Pontremoli and Mr. Reinach ponder design choices for the house. The book describes the architect and the owner obsessing over window latches, tableware modeled after archaeological finds and streamlined blond furniture “with turned feet, bronze scrolls, or huge nails, to give an impression of asceticism and refinement.”

Théodore hosted his brothers Salomon, an archaeologist, and Joseph, a politician who had nearly derailed his career by vehemently defending Alfred Dreyfus (a Jewish military officer accused of treason). Joseph’s son Adolphe, a budding archaeologist and photographer, eventually confides in Mr. Leccia about a family scandal.

The brothers had authenticated a domed-gold tiara said to have belonged to an ancient Scythian king, but when it was revealed to be an erudite Russian goldsmith’s forgery, “everyone was laughing at us,” Adolphe recalls.

During Mr. Goetz’s research for the novel, he was allowed to see the tiara, kept in storage at the Louvre. “It’s the museum’s most incredible fake,” he said. It is considered a masterful interpretation of what Belle Époque collectors, curators and historians wanted the rediscovered past to look like in their dreams — not unlike the Villa Kérylos itself.

In 1914, Adolphe Reinach was killed by German forces in northeast France. Mr. Goetz puts Mr. Leccia in the same regiment at the front, helplessly watching his brilliant friend fall and later suffering his own severe battle wounds. Mr. Leccia also includes mournful and historically correct details of which Reinach and Pontremoli relatives were killed during the Holocaust and how Nazis pillaged the villa.

There is an upbeat note in the last chapter (hint: Boy finds girl while Grace Kelly marries Prince Rainier) and in real life. The villa is so well preserved that for visitors, “It’s as if you could buy an entry ticket any day to visit Atlantis,” Mr. Goetz said. “There are ghosts everywhere.”

He was granted permission to spend a few nights at the house. “Tourists were very surprised to see me pass by with my bag from the Beaulieu-sur-Mer supermarket,” he said. He did not dare to disturb any watchful spirits by using the master bathrooms lined in marble and mosaic, nor the piano hidden inside a lemon-wood cabinet.

At night on the Reinachs’ “almost island,” he said, “I could hear this house creaking, like a boat.” When he opened one empty chest, he added, “it gave off this incredible scent of exotic wood. It’s a smell that has crossed the years, the same that Théodore Reinach breathed in.”

This article is part of our latest Design special report, which is about crossing the borders of space, time and media.

Artists and designers who work with ceramics and glass might be thought of as delicate types. After all, they specialize in works that can easily break.

But the converse tends to be true. It requires steady-handed bravery to blow glass or fire up a kiln, given the melting, explosions and shattering that are a normal part of the process.

Rui Sasaki fits this counterintuitive mold. She is soft-spoken but extremely dogged in her exploration of a tricky medium on a large scale, as with what is perhaps her best-known work, “Liquid Sunshine/I am a Pluviophile,” a commission for the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y., which was on long-term view until January and is now part of the museum’s collection.

It is made of more than 200 raindrop-shape pieces of phosphorescent glass, and Ms. Sasaki spent about a year making it. She is now working on a new version of the piece for the Toyama Glass Art Museum.

“Fragility and breaking glass is an inspiration for me,” Ms. Sasaki, 36, said from her home in Kanazawa, Japan. “Because glass is very fragile, but it’s really strong — much stronger than iron in some ways.”

Ms. Sasaki’s great subject is the weather, which, in the wrong hands, could be a banal topic. She infuses it with mystery.

“It’s an important inspiration for me,” Ms. Sasaki said. “We never really get great sunshine in my area, and it’s the most rainy city in Japan. It’s always cloudy.” She was raised in a suburb of Tokyo, where it was much sunnier, she said.

Rather than create static objects to be looked at, Ms. Sasaki is also expert at activating her installations. In Corning, “Liquid Sunshine” was experienced by visitors in a darkened room, where the lights went off each time someone entered, courtesy of a motion detector.

The bits of phosphorescent material, which were being constantly charged, would glow, but then fade over time as people lingered in the space, “the way the memory of sunshine fades during the dark days of winter,” Ms. Sasaki wrote in her artist’s statement for the piece.

She used phosphorescent glass similarly in the 2015 work “Weather Chandelier,” which was attached to a solar panel. She has to special-order the phosphorescent material from China.

Susie Silbert, the Corning Museum curator who worked on “Liquid Sunshine,” said Ms. Sasaki’s preparations impressed her.

“Rui met with scientists to see how clear glass could work with phosphorescence,” Ms. Silbert said. “She really had to troubleshoot that. It was a lot of research. Not all glass shapes can hold it.”

Though Ms. Sasaki creates aesthetically pleasing objects, her work can have an edge of menace, too. Her 2010 installation “Walking on Glass” had visitors do just that, pulverizing glass panes into dust. For “Self-Container No. 2,” exhibited in 2015, she created a box of clear glass blocks, open on top, just barely large enough to fit her own body in a folded-up position.

Growing up, “I wanted to be an archaeologist or a surgeon,” Ms. Sasaki said. But in high school, she traveled with her father to Okinawa, a hub of craft activity in Japan, where she saw glass blown for the first time.

“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is glass,’” she said. “I was fascinated with it, so I switched my career goals.”

Ms. Sasaki rarely works with colored glass, preferring the clear version for her projects.

She said that as a child, “I was really obsessed with swimming in the ocean and the pool. I always want to be in the water all the time, and I’m really interested in transparent material.”

After the Okinawa visit, she made a connection in her mind: “Water is glass. Glass is water.”

She went to her parents with the bad news. Ms. Sasaki recalled, “I told them, ‘I want to be an artist,’ and they were, like, ‘Oh, my God, you’re going to choose an unstable life?’ They were so surprised.”

Ms. Sasaki, who is a full-time faculty member at a local art school, Kanazawa Utatsuyama Kogei Kobo, got her Bachelor of Arts degree from Musashino Art University outside Tokyo in 2006. She then went to the Rhode Island School of Design for a Master of Fine Arts degree, perfecting her English along the way.

“R.I.S.D. was a culture shock for her,” said Jocelyne Prince, the head of the school’s glass department and one of Ms. Sasaki’s professors. “I almost failed her that first semester. But her tenacity eventually worked in her favor.”

Ms. Prince said that it took time for Ms. Sasaki to get used to an experimental approach — “working in a way that was more about the question than the finished result” — but that her struggles were common for many graduate students.

“She found her groove, and then she was unstoppable,” Ms. Prince said. “Her work hasn’t lost its experimental nature. It’s become better while remaining fresh.”

Ms. Sasaki’s tenacity was useful when it was time to present “Liquid Sunshine” at the Corning Museum of Glass. Though she spent months planning it, she was at the museum for only three days at the very end of the installation process.

“She wanted to use a glossy paint on the floor, so the pieces could be reflective,” Ms. Silbert recalled. “But at that point we weren’t able to de-install the whole piece to do that. So we came up with an alternative: We covered the floor in reflective Mylar.”

Instead of being thrown by a last-minute snag, Ms. Silbert added, “Rui hung tough about the look she wanted to achieve.”

Ms. Sasaki’s next project was scheduled to debut in September at the Portland Japanese Garden in Oregon, but it has been postponed because of the pandemic.

“It’s rainy there, so it’s perfect,” she said. Discussing Portland’s climate got her thinking about clouds generally and why she likes to try to depict them.

“A cloud you can’t touch or grab,” Ms. Sasaki said. “It’s a foggy shape, it’s temporary. I think it’s these ambiguous things that are interesting to me.”

This article is part of our latest Design special report, which is about crossing the borders of space, time and media.

Fresh ways of seeing can end up joyously shared planetwide, sometimes even in eras more terrible than the spring of 2020, as these design books reveal. Readers in confinement may be able to feel swept away to Soviet hydroplane interiors, Danish doll makers’ workshops, nightclub back rooms and well-disinfected hotels.

Could we ever need more insight than we do now about how to dry our hands in washrooms while touching almost nothing? Samuel Ryde, a British photographer, pays homage to air blowers mounted near sinks that can help us, in “Hand Dryers” (Unicorn Publishing Group, $15, 80 pp.).

His text explores the evolution of the technology; inventors and corporations have been vying to improve the equipment’s wind speed since the 1920s. (Sir James Dyson, the Airblade king, provides the volume’s foreword.) In slight variations on the standard white, black or steel rectangles, the machines are “sentenced to a life of servitude,” Mr. Ryde writes. He adds that they symbolize “progress and social order” while serving as “an object of intrigue.” He chose 255 images for this pocketbook-size book, juxtaposing soullessly pristine machines with battered examples bearing scrawled love messages or out-of-order warnings.

Anyone who has traveled may feel longings for the days of unpredictable lavatory conditions at highway rest stops on many continents. People contemplating washroom renovations post-pandemic may find helpful suggestions for installing hand dryers against backdrops of beige or psychedelic tiles or wallpaper patterned with pizza slices, leopards or songbirds.

Mr. Ryde’s project evolved out of an Instagram hit, as did the pilot Bill Young’s “Hotel Carpets” (Hoxton Mini Press, $12.95, 128 pp.). Mr. Young has spent countless jetlag-fogged hours staring downward in airports and lobbies. The grids and swirls underfoot can start to look like “an art project I did in the fourth grade,” he writes. Cheerier patterns remind him of landscapes that he glimpses from cockpits: “Mount Fuji towering above the clouds,” the Thames slicing through London, “the obnoxious highways in Los Angeles” and neon Las Vegas’s contrast with “the surrounding bleak desert.”

Some geometric motifs make him think of toy robots, bats, semen, oil slicks, hamburgers and “like somebody spilled a large bowl of ramen on the floor,” he writes. Readers getting into the spirit of his photos may interpret the tufted expanses as rooster heads, trampled books, motherboards and the awful cottony flashes that laptops make just before they die. Mr. Young’s 20-something daughter Jill Young, who helped bring global social media attention to his posts, contributes an essay recalling happy childhood hours navigating pink diamonds and yellow circles in hotel corridor floor coverings.

The Soviets tried to censor rug designs, as the Russian scholars Kristina Krasnyanskaya and Alexander Semenov document in “Soviet Design: From Constructivism to Modernism 1920-1980” (Scheidegger & Spiess, $85, 448 pp.) The sumptuous book’s sketches and photos of objects and interiors, drawn from little-known archives, show how government-approved design parameters evolved. Overlapping polychrome circles and squares from the 1920s gave way to the postwar bombast of oversize sickle motifs and quasi-neoclassical rosettes and scrollwork. Avant-garde ideas ended up “left abandoned on the hard shoulder of Communism’s ideological highway,” the authors write.

Some trends from Western Europe and America nonetheless seeped in, and a streak of utopianism and nonconformism surfaces in 1920s proposals for teardrop-shaped single-occupancy airplanes and 1970s zigzagging bookcase prototypes that dangled from ceilings. The authors supply thumbnail biographies of influential designers and architects — the best known today are Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko. Some were executed for defying regime dogma, and others managed to stay in business into the 21st century. The designers’ ideas for multipurpose furniture — tables that morph into chairs and lecterns, rollout beds that tuck beneath desks — seem especially relevant in our sheltered-in-place age.

“Scandinavian Design and the United States, 1890-1980,” by the curators Bobbye Tigerman and Monica Obniski (Prestel, $65, 336 pp.), is the catalog for one of the season’s most anticipated design exhibitions. (One hopes it will not be too derailed from its scheduled two-year journey to museums in Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Stockholm and Oslo.)

The two main authors, heading a team of 18 essay contributors, note that they set out to bust stereotypes of Scandinavians primarily bringing “organicism and naturalism” to America. Early waves of Nordic-flavored products in the United States included heavily ornamented log outbuildings (one was turned into Central Park’s Swedish Cottage) and silver punch bowls trimmed in dragons modeled after Viking ship prows.

By the 1950s, Chrysler was upholstering sedan seats in textured tweedy metallics by the Finnish-born designer Marianne Strengell. American design students took classes with Ms. Strengell and other Scandinavian celebrities at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, among other institutions. But the postwar generation did not necessarily riff on Hans Wegner’s familiar blond chairs or Tapio Wirkkala’s leaf-shaped veiny trays. The jewelry maker Arline Fisch’s fellowship in Denmark inspired her to drape Egyptian faience beads from a silver filigree jellyfish. The artist Howard Smith, a Philadelphia native, resettled in Finland while designing floral textiles with bold black outlines.

And this book has one snapshot almost guaranteed to relieve lockdown anxiety for a moment; it shows President John F. Kennedy cheered up between meetings with Vietnam War advisers, when a spiky-haired plastic troll doll newly imported from Denmark was brought to the Oval Office.

The alpaca’s scream sounded like a high-pitched electric pencil sharpener, more machine than mammal. It was awful, and that was the point. The group behind the video, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has been publicizing graphic scenes like this long enough to know which sights and sounds make people feel the most miserable.

This footage was filmed during an “undercover investigation” at a Peruvian farm, the group said, and shown to The New York Times recently, before being released more widely. It’s part of PETA’s latest project: ridding the world of alpaca sweaters. That means agitating the people who wear them, the retailers who sell them and the manufactures who make them.

PETA’s mode of making social change has always been to inspire shock and ignite boycotts. For years, we’ve watched videos of screaming animals and seen red paint splatter fur coats. With these in-your-face and highly visual tactics, the activists helped win the culture war over fur.

But it’s been 15 years now since Anna Wintour was last dealt a tofu pie to the face.

Behind closed doors, PETA has embarked on a mission of corporate diplomacy. These days, much of its activism involves organizing conference calls and sending forceful but respectful emails. Supporters don’t flood the streets as often as they flood Twitter. The famously loud group, now 40 years old, is operating more quietly. More brands than ever are listening.

“We’re no longer storming the offices of fashion companies,” said Laura Shields, the corporate responsibility manager at PETA. “Now we’re getting invited to come sit down at the boardroom table.”

How PETA Enacts Its Influence in Private

One aspect of PETA’s activism has not changed: There must be a villain. Before an investigation goes public, it’s the job of Ms. Shields’s team to make a list of candidates.

Typically, this happens after PETA’s investigations department has identified an industry (like angora wool) or an individual supplier (like a factory) suspected of abusing animals, and gathered supporting footage. The corporate responsibility team then determines which brands use the supplier or support that industry.

Ms. Shields, 37, said that when choosing a target, PETA considers how much animal material is being sold by the company, whether the company can influence others and whether the company’s core market has strong feelings about animals. (The more young female customers, the better.) Last year, for example, targets included Nordstrom (for fur) and Madewell (for cashmere).

It’s a single-minded, black-and-white approach, as extreme as the activists’ trademark nudity or hyperbolic language, even if not as showy. It doesn’t matter to PETA if a company makes a good-faith pledge to source responsibly or phase out certain products over time. If it’s still selling animals, it’s still a mark.

At the end of 2019, as the corporate responsibility team mulled over the alpaca investigation, its potential targets were narrowed down to H&M, Gap and Anthropologie. The three brands were all reasonably likely to consider an alpaca ban; during a previous PETA campaign, each had promised to stop selling mohair products.

On Dec. 9, PETA sent emails to the three companies. H&M and Gap were warned that a “highly confidential investigation” into alpaca was coming, and they were asked to meet right away.

H&M responded the next day, according to emails provided by a PETA official. The company said it was “so grateful” that PETA had reached out and given it “the opportunity to act if needed.”

By the end of January, H&M and Gap had spoken to PETA over video chat, exchanged emails with the group, received video of the writhing and wailing Peruvian alpacas and come to the same decision: They would not use the farm’s parent company as a supplier in the future.

A Gap representative explained the company’s reasoning in an email to PETA, writing that it was “a result of business decisions that were already underway, and influenced by the findings from the investigation.” The representative added: “Personally, I was heartbroken to watch the video and want you to know that this has been a top priority.”

To PETA’s disappointment, however, neither company would commit to banning alpaca outright. (“Sorry for not having a more happy reply to send you this Friday,” the H&M representative wrote.)

When asked about how decisions like these are made, H&M’s sustainability expert, Madelene Ericsson, said the company wants to use animal materials only when “we believe we can actually make a change for the animals” — meaning to “only source from good farms.” A representative for Gap did not respond to The Times before publication.

PETA’s attempts to sway Anthropologie went a little differently.

In its Dec. 9 email, PETA told Anthropologie executives it wanted to give them “the opportunity to do right before we launch this new investigation.”

“In the past, PETA has found it impactful to approach retailers before publicizing new investigations,” the group wrote, so that brands could “get ahead of the issue and be praised for taking corrective actions, rather than having to scramble after-the-fact.”

This message was more pointed than those sent to H&M and Gap, in part because while Anthropologie did ban mohair in 2018, it did not announce that decision until the day after PETA urged followers to protest Anthropologie. If the company worked with PETA now, before the alpaca video went public, it wouldn’t be called out like that again.

Anthropologie did not respond to the email, PETA said, or to follow-up messages. (Urban Outfitters, the parent company of Anthropologie, declined to speak to The New York Times for this article.)

With that, PETA found its target.

Because of that lack of response, PETA plans to issue an “action alert” on Anthropologie, instructing supporters to send Anthropologie pre-written emails — using one of PETA’s online tools — pleading that the company “think of gentle alpacas.”

In the meantime, PETA will publicly highlight H&M and Gap for cutting ties with the Peruvian farm.

When PETA Needed the Media

When Tracy Reiman, the executive vice president of PETA, considers the group’s legacy, she thinks about a day in January 1994, when she and her colleagues stormed the offices of Calvin Klein, yelling and spray-painting the walls until seven of them were arrested.

Afterward, Mr. Klein agreed to a meeting with PETA, watched a graphic video and subsequently announced he would no longer sell fur. The activists declared victory, though the designer later said he made his decision before the raid. (Furriers cast doubt on this claim.)

“For me, it reinforced how PETA’s pushy style can really force change quickly,” said Ms. Reiman, 52, calling the Klein protest a “watershed moment.”

Throughout the 1990s, the war on fur raged on; sometimes it seemed as if activists had the upper hand, until fur sales rebounded or until magazines or designers revived the trend. In the 2000s, PETA continued to disrupt runway shows and flour-bomb celebrities.

Fur supporters fought back. After the 2005 tofu pie incident, when Ms. Wintour was asked how she would respond, she reportedly answered: “Wear more fur.” But PETA’s rhetoric was always more heated and vengeful.

After Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell, who’d posed nude in a 1994 anti-fur ad that raised PETA’s national profile, were seen wearing fur again, PETA called Ms. Crawford “desperate” and Ms. Campbell a “disgrace,” suggesting her change in heart was a result of her “taking” something. (Ms. Campbell has said she sought treatment for addiction in 1997.)

In 2003, Ingrid Newkirk, the PETA founder, attributed its extreme language to being “complete press sluts.” At the time, the organization depended heavily on the media to cover its behavior and make its causes known. It doesn’t anymore.

“We would work very hard to get an eight-second clip from one of our videos on the news at night, which was nearly impossible because it was so graphic,” Ms. Reiman said. “Now we’ll put it on Facebook or Instagram, and millions of people will see it within 24 hours.”

That doesn’t mean PETA has abandoned stunts. Most recently, the organization erected billboards that connected the origin of the coronavirus with meat: “Tofu never caused a pandemic. Try it today!” And it still tries to use the press to amplify its causes. (Which is why it will likely release its alpaca investigation to the public right after this article is published.)

Now the power and ease of social media — the way it fuels call-out culture — is one reason “we don’t have to get arrested or push the envelope too far,” Ms. Reiman said. “In the early days, we’d have to fight for two years to win a campaign. These days we tend to win within hours.”

Today PETA works behind the scenes with hundreds of retail companies, Ms. Reiman added, though a few refuse to publicly acknowledge the activists, and others completely ignore them. Some of these dealings are even warm (see: Gap and H&M), in a sterile kind of way.

Still, no matter how good the relationship with a company, Ms. Reiman said, PETA won’t hesitate to put a brand on blast if its requests are ignored or rejected.

“Many companies respect us for it, or perhaps they fear us,” she said, “but either way they talk to us.”

What Changed? We Did.

While a handful of major designers eliminated fur before 2010 — Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Stella McCartney and Vivienne Westwood, among others — the real cease-fire began when the Italian luxury houses went fur free.

Armani announced in 2016, followed by Gucci in 2017, Versace in 2018 and Prada in 2019. Fendi, which popularized “fun fur” under its former creative director Karl Lagerfeld, has notably held on to its skins.

Fur-free brands now include fast-fashion companies (Asos and Zara), outdoor retailers (the North Face and Timberland) and high-end e-commerce platforms (Net-a-Porter and Farfetch). The state of California has banned fur sales entirely. Even PETA’s current fashion nemesis, Canada Goose, has stepped (slightly) away from fur.

PETA is not the only organization appealing to brands on the corporate level. PJ Smith, the fashion policy director at the Humane Society of the United States, has spent the last decade working on fur bans, including with several of the same luxury brands.

At first it was difficult to get meetings, Mr. Smith said. As he tells it, a wall had been erected between activists and the clothing industry, largely because of PETA’s past provocations. Once, he recalled, he went to meet with a company’s executive staff and was greeted at the door by a retired police officer. “They thought I was going to show up with a bucket of blood and a sign,” he said.

Around 2005, when the Humane Society began working with retailers on legislation requiring clear labeling of fur — trying to prevent real fur from being sold as faux — the wall started coming down. Mr. Smith gradually learned not to open meetings by showing companies images of animals in pain; it was more effective to send links.

When asked if he thought animal activists’ approach or the industry’s response had changed more, Mr. Smith said neither. Shoppers changed. They started caring more about fashion’s environmental footprint, particularly younger consumers. Animals were part of that. A 2019 luxury market report by the Boston Consulting Group found that 36 percent of Gen Z respondents chose animal care as their most valued aspect of sustainability.

Brands suddenly saw the marketing potential in going fur free, Mr. Smith said. Most of these brands didn’t sell much fur anyway. (Leather and exotic skins — which only a few companies have pledged to stopped using — were another story.) When Gucci announced its fur ban on Instagram, it became the brand’s most liked post that didn’t have Harry Styles in it.

“Now there’s almost this competition,” Mr. Smith said. “Everyone wants to be a leader.”

One of these contenders, H&M, has had an animal welfare and material ethics policy in place since 2004, Ms. Ericsson said.

Maintaining a “close dialogue” with organizations including PETA has become an important part of this policy, Ms. Ericsson said: “We share the same view that no animals should be harmed in the name of fashion.”

Sharing this view may be a radical shift from PETA’s more notorious years, when fashion executives openly called the group “thoroughly obnoxious,” and when it “had to beg, steal and borrow” attention, said Lisa Lange, the senior vice president for communications of PETA, who has worked there for 28 years.

But supporters don’t seem to mind the taming of PETA. In 2019, the organization’s contributions hit $49.1 million, more than triple the contributions in 2000 — the height of the era of throwing paint and pies. Playing (sort of) nice is working for PETA.

“We’re not knives out instantly,” Ms. Lange said. “That’s something I think people don’t know. There is a lot of communicating that goes on before the knives come out.”