During the 2025 edition of LDF, I attended a panel discussion on the future of design. Despite the broad topic, conversation quickly narrowed to sustainability. Material innovation, social inclusion, and product longevity were addressed. Yet, strikingly, there was little discussion of the design of things as things.
One panellist suggested that designers’ guilt for adding more “stuff” into the world could be absolved by using the right materials: recycled, natural, biodegradable, ethically sourced, etc. While material choice is undeniably significant, it is arguably more important to consider how these materials are applied, how objects function, what needs they address, their expression and their societal implications – the design of things.
It has become standard for designers and manufacturers to validate work through material virtue alone. New products may use the “right” materials, but often deploy them in ways that imply we inhabit a frictionless world where scale, function, and tone are secondary or irrelevant. This one-dimensional approach ignores the designer’s responsibility to take into account what their work actually communicates.
Much contemporary design prioritises style and performative gesture, rather than proposing alternative modes of living. Simply put, there is a growing disconnect between design today and the reality of the world it promises to serve.
This disconnect is, in part, a byproduct of industry itself. Manufacturers and brands have become increasingly conservative, their once visionary missions now limited in deference to shareholder interests. In the absence of a real project, sustainability agendas have stepped in to fill the void and provide seemingly ethical narrative coherence. At first, this often appears legitimate, but sustainable production should not stand in place of design ambition; it should form part of a broader, integrated approach. When sustainable production and materiality is framed as the singular issue, the implication is that design, rather than society and its structures, is what needs fixing. In this framing, design is demoted. From a tool capable of addressing systemic issues, it is repurposed as a commodity, positioned as palatable in a changing cultural climate.
Another result of this conservatism is that manufacturers tend to work with a small pool of market-proven designers, leveraging their status to mitigate risk and market products. This leaves the majority of designers struggling to engage meaningfully with industry, and forced to explore alternative means to sustain their practice.
Isolated from industry, projects centred on scalability and production, and thus with potential for reach and social relevance, rarely align with the realities of individual practice. Conversely, one of the few viable avenues for the individual designer is the “collectible” market, where high-wealth individuals acquire objects as cultural capital and designers operate largely outside the constraints of industry and utility. Within this market, priority is given to form, exceptionalism, and personal expression. In this mode, design tends towards fine art.
This shift has inevitably impacted the way we talk about design. Increasingly, design discourse adopts language more commonly associated with art, normalising subjective conversations around form and cultural commentary, whilst sidelining the quantifiable aspects of design such as function, efficiency, ergonomics, manufacture and affordability. Yet, ironically, these are precisely the factors that distinguish design from fine art. As a fragmenting discourse drifts away from these concerns, our collective ability to evaluate design on its own terms recedes.
Perversely, the growth and perceived success of this market, evident in the current proliferation of collectible platforms, appears to be feeding back into industry. Increasingly, design manufacturers develop products that appear opportunistic, as they hope to capitalise on this momentum despite its contradiction with their stated behaviour and values.
At the same time, manufacturers continue to seek new areas of exploration, aiming to gain competitive advantage within the market. Through the traditional lens of design, this manifests as newly identified problems and their novel solutions. The result is a market crowded with overly prescriptive products that claim to answer every imagined need, yet prove useful only in narrow contexts of use and environment. This rigidity is fundamentally at odds with the adaptability required to address contemporary challenges.
Part of a designer’s role should be to question the motive. Design should seek to shape consumer culture and behaviour, not merely cater to market whims. When we produce solutions for every hypothesised need, we surround users with an infrastructure that seems to provide everything, whilst in reality discouraging thoughtfulness and deepening disconnection amidst a profusion of things. If we are to encourage conscious consumption and sustainable lifestyles, designers must ask why, not only how.
In the post-war period, designers championed material and structural efficiency, rejecting the heavy, over-stuffed design that was no longer appropriate to the time. This was the result of critical practice responding to societal and material realities, that ultimately reshaped tastes and behaviours, demonstrating design’s capacity to propose alternative relationships with our material world.
By contrast, much contemporary practice produces work that appears to satisfy the criteria of good design – highly resolved, functional and aesthetic, but is realised from an uncritical perspective. By failing to situate the brief and motive within the broader contexts of the world, design is limited to mere object creation (however refined), and diminishes its potential as a stimulus of meaningful change.
Critical design is now often confined to speculative projects intended to provoke discussion, or to material experimentation far removed from real-world application. While such work plays a valuable role in research and discussion, treating it as a complete form of design risks separating critique from consequence, and can feel cynical when it remains disconnected from lived realities. This tendency is arguably fostered by the education sector’s growing distance from industry.
Whilst it is important to recognise how critical practice has historically driven transformation, we must also acknowledge how Modernism’s social ambitions were ultimately overtaken by market, reduced to an aesthetic language wielded by industry to drive sales and reinforce notions of exclusivity. Designers themselves often presented ideologies dogmatically, shaped through the perspective of a single privileged group. Such an approach is ill-suited to today’s diverse world, where claims of ‘correctness’ can serve to stifle ongoing discourse. We must accept that no single answer exists and instead pursue a direction rather than a total ideal.
Design has always spoken to human desire, which is partly why it can be so readily co-opted by corporate agendas. But if we frame design as a tool of communication, and interrogate intention, we can still see its potential to align personal desire with collective needs.
Where this shift will originate is unclear. What is certain, however, is that renewed discourse around the actual design of things is essential if we hope to engage with contemporary challenges in a deeper and more effective way. Conversations surrounding the future of design should centre on ideas of how we should live and consume, and how the design of things can facilitate positive change. The growing disparity between the design community and an increasingly conservative industry has thinned this discourse, fragmenting it into a discussion of symptoms rather than fundamental issues. In this, we risk losing not only design’s discourse and critical agency, but our very understanding of what design is. Until we begin talking seriously about design again, its capacity to effect change will remain unfulfilled.