Design Always

• It is most understood as a visual phenomenon, but it is perceptually all-encompassing – the grip of a door lever, the incline of a floor surface, the cadence of sound and silence, the inhale of a moment of brisk air: one should never forget this.

• The patterns of our world and of our histories teach us much, and provide an underpinning for our efforts; let’s be careful about too much ‘future-forward’ inclinations – Louis Kahn reminds us that ‘what will be has always been’; and Alvaro Siza declares ‘Architects don’t invent anything; they transform reality’.
  
• Design is about articulating strategy to reveal purpose.
  
• There is a silver lining for every circumstance presented to us; we need to look harder and deeper sometimes.
  
• ‘By design’ is not always true; we are fortunate that society has a heavy hand in finding the merits of our work to yield something more powerful than what was envisioned; we need to be more embracing when this happens.
  
• Engaging the world is an act of design; it serves as a construct - in how we learn, work, and live; we are constantly articulating and re-arranging our interface with our community.
  
• An open-ended journey, we address circumstances while sowing seeds for new conditions to arise.
  
• It mimics the world in which we live – that is to say that it is inherently complex, despite our efforts to seek simple; when we ‘design’ we make more than things – we are forging systems, strategies, and stories.
  

Without question there are more points to be made; design is ever-present in shaping our daily deliberations. It is motivator, enabler and aspiration all at once.