What Role Will Design Play in a Post-COVID World?

How do we run our lives in a post-COVID world? What’s most important to us now, personally and professionally? How will people think about their homes in the future? And what will be more important to us there? How are we all planning to change—and change for good?

15 design professionals came together in a recent candid Zoom conversation arranged by Snyder Diamond and led by  FORM designs Studio's  Josh Rose and Rafael “Rafi” Kalichstein—and all of those questions arose. The in-depth, free-ranging conversation ranged from ways to mitigate project waste, how to better utilize local vendors, how to balance economic interests and personal ethics and how to bring about broader behavioral changes, both personally and industry-wide, as leaders in design.

This discussion has a broader theme too, one of reclaiming our humanity, unifying and striving to be our best selves, all of which resonates deeply for FORM’s Josh and Rafi. Their practice strives to balance taste with holistic living, blending beauty with sustainability. Rafi also counts nearly a twenty-year journey in the world of Eastern healing and is a certified practitioner of Black Hat Feng Shui, which is integrated into FORM’s residential and commercial design work.

Though the talk is serious and introspective, it leans largely positive. As Rafi noted at one point of his experience of the weeks since the COVID-19 pandemic began, “I will never let myself fall back into the same patterns that I’ve been stuck in for a long time. I think I’ve been so driven by production and by the need to produce that I’ve lost sight of the value of stillness and the value of space, and I won’t ever let that happen again. I’m hoping that will inform my creative process and my business design, but I know it will feed my soul.”

Watch the full design talk below.

Photo credit -- Matt Murray