NOW AVAILABLE: Adulting by design

ED'S NOTE:

Well, look at you, a whole design grown-up. Who would have thought you’d come this far? You sanded, sealed, and varnished that parquet instead of succumbing to generational trauma and covering every inch of floor in your home with cold, gleaming, white tiles.

While you are, at times, nostalgic for your student days, the beanbags in your reading nook are no longer from the side of the road but from Vetsak. You went from wearing Crocs — because their “comfort” far outweighed the derision — to upgrading them over lockdown when Bad Bunny and Justin Bieber followed Post Malone in imbuing them with a new cool. Your music, once tolerated from a tinny HiFi Corp surround system, is now driven by a McIntosh amp, Rega Planar 10/Apheta 3 turntable, and a pair of floor-standing Vienna Acoustics Mozart Grand Symphony speakers in cherry wood.

Your dream car went from all manner of stupidly rapid hatchbacks — my first car was a suitably brisk Citi Golf CTI that didn’t stop too well (thankfully, it didn’t kill me but, true to legend, it was stolen from outside my then complex) — to design triumphs from the 1950s to your current obscure obsession, the big-bottomed Porsche 924, sans spoiler, from the 1980s.

The examples are endless, and you should be immensely proud of your progress. If we are making the same design choices today for the same reasons we did decades ago, we surely cannot be progressing as fully formed, responsible adults of taste.

Reflecting on his own connection with design, Gary Cotterell — a design adult if ever there was one — underscores this idea of evolving relationships with design over one lifetime: what design really needs right now, from people who genuinely care about its transformative possibilities, is for them to don their capes and become its bravest champions, because “good design encompasses so much more than the latest trends or aesthetic preferences. It involves understanding the intricate web of processes, from farms and forests to mines to labourers, and the environmental impact of production, use, and disposal.”

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