Have you recently attended a meeting where you were left to stand in a lobby, idly waiting for your host, who then offered little more than a ‘hello’? No business card, offer of water or coffee, or any real sense of arrival? Or maybe you checked into a hotel that markets itself as design-led, only to find the next morning that housekeeping had been reduced to an every-other-day arrangement, never mind the art of a discreet turndown service. Or heaven forbid — and maybe it’s time to find a proper travel agent — you were surprised to find that, instead of a human welcome, you were greeted by a computer terminal that spouted nothing but errors, unable to handle even the slightest customer service edge case. And yet you can see, quite clearly, in many of these cases, the interiors were given the social media treatment, with little regard for the person who’d ultimately be subjected to the experience.

This not-so-hypothetical hospitality experience is symptomatic of a plague of value-engineered solutions to problems that never really existed — an erosion of thoughtfulness that my colleagues and I talk about a lot on our editorial calls, as we debate the merits of a new diner, hotel, home or the work of an emerging interior designer or architect. It’s resulted in work designed for one thing: eyeballs. Are these alert, aroused and curious eyeballs? And are they attached to the kind of person you actually want to meet, have waiting in your lobby, lounging by your pool, or living as a resident in the community you say you’re so focused on fostering? I think you know the answer.

I’m neither the first, nor likely the last, to opine on what can sometimes feel like a descent into mass cognitive malaise. Despite the acuteness of the current moment, it’s not new: the design industry has faced this for years, pursuing views, taps and clicks over the very humans who’ll use a space or product. One of our favourite practitioners, Ilse Crawford, speaks often about designing for both measurable and unmeasurable values such as dignity, generosity and respect.

So, for the next few hundred pages, it’s my pleasure to have you in our world, a place free of QR codes and unflattering lighting, where these values are treated as requisites. We’re confident that these pages offer much more than the sum of their physical parts. Our journalism should inspire you but also challenge you. This magazine, in all its tactile glory, should help you navigate the world around you — the real one — and understand what makes it move, where the fault lines lie, and where opportunities exist to mitigate them.

Ultimately, we hope this issue offers a little touch of magic and, dare we say it, romanticism for the world as it could be if we all put as much care in as we can. Let’s dive in.

Jeremy Smart
Editor-in-Chief