The question was: what’s something positive happening right now when it comes to sustainability?

It was a nice repose, because as to be expected, a conversation about sustainability can all too quickly devolve into a depressing downward spiral. And it’s easy to forget that there are people doing quietly extraordinary things. This is the answer I was ready with…

The most exciting thing when it comes to sustainable materials right now is creating a barbell effect. When you look at the two extreme ends, that’s where the good stuff is. And while they look like opposites, they’re both different expressions of the same goal.

I commandeered the name of this shape from the finance world. Coined by Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, the barbell is a strategy where you load up on the two extremes and mostly ignore the middle. In essence, you have weight stacked at either end, and a thin bar running between. This feels like a fair description of where sustainable materials sit right now.

At one end, the ancient stuff is having a resurgence. Lime, hemp, straw, adobe – materials that humans used to build with for centuries and switched out in the early 20th century for what we were sold as a better solution, basically cement that sets faster. These are the low-tech end, and they come with a plethora of benefits. Things like local sourcing, fire and pest resistance, and they intrinsically breathe and regulate air and temperature. They’re about as close to ‘natural’ as a building material gets, though that’s a word I have complicated feelings about (which will have to wait for another essay, at another time). What’s really happening is that people are rediscovering that slower, older ways of building still work, and in a lot of cases work even better.

At the other end, something completely different is going on, and it’s just as exciting. Researchers are engineering new materials out of things like sea algae, mycelium and cellulose. My favourite recent example: a team at Chalmers University in Sweden has developed a 3D-printable material made from baker’s yeast – the same stuff in your bread – bound together with wood fibre, seaweed extract and plant glycerol. You print it, let it dry at room temperature, and end up with a translucent panel you could hang on a wall. It requires no kiln, and has zero plastic.

So one end is reaching back centuries and the other is reaching into the future through scientific discovery. And while at first it seems like they oppose each other, they’re two solutions shuttling towards the same place.

Both are trying to get us off the materials doing the real damage – the carbon-intensive, forever-chemical-laden stuff like cement and plastic that we’ve defaulted to for the last hundred years. One side gets us there by looking backwards, embracing the slow and the low-tech. The other through sheer human ingenuity, inventing things that simply didn’t exist before.

Which leaves the poor middle – the conventional materials most of the built world is still made from. What happens to the thin bar between the two weights? I don’t know yet, and I don’t think anyone honestly does.

So, I guess, watch this space.

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I’m Aleesha – a design journalist, former magazine editor, briefly an interior designer, founder of About Futures and co-host of Creative or Dead. This is where I think out loud about design, media and my journey into the quagmire of sustainable design.

Aleesha x

The best materials, though, are the opposite. They should change for the better over time – when the timber has greyed off, the render has softened, and the whole building has settled so far into itself that you couldn’t picture it any other way.

A fantastic example of this is Ennenda Mill in Switzerland, renovated by Atelier Lando Rossmaier. It could easily have been scrubbed up and made to look new. Instead, the architects peeled the layers back and let the centuries show – textured crumbling walls, worn stone, humungous timber beams so big you could never replace them anyway. Where it needed repair, they worked with lime and hemp, and used only materials from within sixteen kilometres. The building wears its whole life on its surface, and it wears it proudly.

The Japanese studio Roovice works in a similar vein. So much of what they do is subtraction – stripping a building back to its old structure rather than layering new finishes on top, until the bones of the original become the finished surface. The age isn’t hidden but rather the essence of the design.

And you don’t need a celebrated project to see it. Walk around any old city, especially in Italy: Rome, Milan, half the towns in between, and this weathering is on nearly every corner: hundreds of years of stone, softened and patched and worked over by one generation of hands after another, beautiful precisely because of its patina. None of it was restored to look new, it was allowed to just keep ageing.

It comes back to the same question, and I think it’s the one to ask of any material before we’re willing to call it sustainable… how will it wear when no one is looking after it?

This is a benchmark we should be striving for: how will a material age, untended, across decades. Will it patina into something better, or simply fall apart?

Hi. Hello! Welcome. A Design Perspective is a space for ideas, conversations and deep dives into architecture, design media, sustainability and the creative process.

I’m a design journalist, former magazine editor, ex-interior designer (briefly) and founder of About Futures, a platform for regenerative design. I write here to look at creative work – and the built environment – beyond the algorithm.

It’s free to subscribe, so I hope you stick around!

Aleesha x

Also find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

While it’s undoubtedly a mainstay for arch theory around the world, it’s not often the first book you’d pull off the shelf for a conversation about sustainability.

Pallasmaa’s argument is essentially a case against the tyranny of the eye. Modern architecture, he says, has been made to be looked at – photographed, published, admired from across a room. But as beings imbued with 5 senses to grapple with, the experience of a building, a space, is one that happens with the whole body. The temperature of a room, the muffled ambient acoustics of your favourite 10-seat restaurant. The cool touch of a brass handrail. We register all of it, quite often subconsciously. And a culture that has become bloated on consuming images, has made it easy to preference one sense and forget the rest. Pallasmaa was expounding this in 1996, well before the invention of the infinite scroll. Now that we’ve had image after image blasted to our retinas for the past decade, his argument was resoundingly prescient.

There’s a line in the book that I’ve reread and even post-it noted:

“Modernist design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless.”

So where does the sustainability angle come in, you might be wondering. Well, interpreted with a different lens, what Pallasmaa is making a case for is buildings that are comfortable. A home designed purely for the final image is the one that’s cold in winter and stifling in summer. The inverse, at the most basic level, then, is a sustainable one.

Now, I know that the entire premise of the book goes much deeper than this single reading. Pallasmaa is asking for more than good thermal performance; he wants a building that’s a delight to be inside. Comfort, in this fuller sense, is just one factor, feeling or atmosphere to design for.

Comfort is far more abstract and nebulous to capture in an image than beauty. But we all know the feeling of being in a space that’s loud and uncomfortable. Which is why I’d argue it’s the hardest test for a building, because it’s also the one thing a photograph can’t take. You either feel it the moment you walk in or you don’t.

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Hi. Hello! Welcome. A Design Perspective is a space for ideas, conversations and deep dives into architecture, design media, sustainability and the creative process.

I’m a design journalist, former magazine editor, ex-interior designer (briefly), founder of About Futures, a publication about the future of sustainable design. And co-host of Creative or Dead. I write here to look at creative work – and the built environment – beyond the algorithm.

It’s free to subscribe, so I hope you stick around!

Aleesha x

Also find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

While the idea matters more than ever, it just feels like the word itself has been whittled away to meaninglessness. But what if English doesn’t have a precise word to begin with? We bandy about “sustainable” because there’s nothing better to hand, and over time it's been overused until it means roughly everything (and therefore nothing.)

So I went looking in another language, and found three words in Japanese that get closer to the thing, the core ideas, more than anything in the English design vocabulary. [Also fun fact, I studied Japanese through high-school, and occasionally the weirdest words come back to me, like Ringo, which means apple 😂]

The first is pretty familiar, and a word that a lot of us think we already know. Wabi-sabi translates as “imperfect beauty.” If it had a mascot, it would be repaired, distressed ceramics. But it has a wee bit more depth than that. Wabi is the refusal of excess – simplicity, austerity, a kind of peace found in having less. Sabi is ageing: patina, weathering, a thing allowed to change honestly over time. A building of simplicity and built to age into itself rather than out of it is the definition of wabi-sabi. And at its core captures the heart of what sustainability longs for.

The second word that doesn’t have its equal counterpart in English is Shibui. It means understated beauty – a quality I’ve seen designers chase for years. While ‘restraint’ could be subbed in, it’s much sharper than that on its own. Shibui is about balancing complexity alongside simplicity. A multi-dimensional word, it also translates as organic and natural, as well as practical and functional. All of these characteristics make for design that is timeless, ages well, and lives outside of ‘trends.’

And the third, Ma, is negative space treated as something active – it’s not a gap, but the deliberate presence of nothing, the pause doing work. Anyone who has flipped through a beautiful design book, or stood in a gallery spaces knows the feeling even if they’ve never had the term for it.

While it would be very easy to lift three elegant words from another culture, and call the problem solved. It’s not the whole picture. None of these words considers the more technical aspects needed in our homes today, whether that’s better thermal performance or awareness of embodied carbon. A house can be impeccably shibui and detailed with toxic materials. A new vocabulary isn’t a method in and of itself. I have no doubt that a new word will replace ‘sustainability’ at some point and then, over time, that word too will be insufficient. But this is a good thing, it’s part of an ongoing process of progress and refinement.

What these three words actually give is more honest. They describe a disposition – build less, build to last, let it age. It’s a reminder that sustainable design, at its most basic, is good design. At the end of the day, yes, the numbers still have to add up. But by looking afield to other languages, we can remember the importance of the core principles.

I’m not going to stop using the word “sustainability.” While it’s not perfect, at the very least it’s universally recognised, for now. I’d be curious whether they land the same way for you.

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AND – taking this exact topic IRL, I’m on an upcoming panel talk with the Authentic Design Alliance. Thursday 16th July at Artbank, alongside Cultivated and Romance Was Born’s Re:Born showcase. Grab a ticket here!

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Hi. Hello! Welcome. This is a space for ideas, conversations and deep dives into design, creativity and culture. It’s free to subscribe, so I hope you stick around.

I’m a design journalist – once an interior designer (for a hot second), then a magazine editor, now a podcast host, and founder of a platform for regenerative design – About Futures. I write here to explore the nuances of creative work beyond the algorithm.

I also work with select clients – find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

But an article in the New York Times this week made me stop and consider the opposite of this. What about bad design? And even worse than bad design, irresponsible design?

In my very first ever design class at uni, I remember the lecturer saying with such profoundness (at least to me at the time) that no one ever notices good design. And it certainly feels true when speaking about furniture, interior design and architecture. There should be an easy, frictionless flow that just feels right. Bad design has a way of making us notice it, whether it’s the awkward change in floor level, or the uncomfortable and unglamorous manoeuvring out of a super low sofa.

From bad to something far worse

For the better part of 20 years now, we’ve been living with the downward spiral of social media. Its allure is always tempting our attention. The much-researched dopamine hit of a ding, ping or red dot – signalling to us in the most basic of human instincts.

All of these UX features are designed to be addictive, created with the intention of gobbling up more and more of our time. Or in the pessimistic ilk of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest – entertaining us to death.

This is the dark side of design. The harm and detriment have been widely critiqued, yet never held accountable in any real, meaningful way. At least until now.

This is such a landmark case because, up until this week, these social media platforms have been able to get out of any responsibility for the known harm they’re unleashing based purely on an old precedent. The 1996 law – Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – has allowed big tech to knowingly inflict harm and not be held accountable because under this law, they don’t own or control the content that’s posted.

Instead, this case has been brought based on design, features such as infinite scroll, algorithmic feeds, autoplay and the preferencing of inflammatory content.

Are the big tech platforms solely to blame? It could be argued that the people designing these UX features didn’t necessarily know what they were creating; they were simply a cog in a larger machine.

There’s a 2017 podcast series by Jon Ronson called The Butterfly Effect, where he traces the long-lasting effects of PornHub. In one of the episodes, Ronson speaks with an early employee, a data scientist, whose job it was to design features that would make the site more addictive, things like autoplay and eye-catching thumbnail design. When pressed on its far-reaching impacts, he seems unaware of how his design experiments have proliferated across every other big tech platform, spawning an avalanche of content feeds intended to keep us hooked and numbed.

And this is where the liability comes into play. The big social media platforms have every intention of keeping us as locked in and online as much as possible. Eyeballs equal money; money keeps shareholders happy.

But it does beg the question – who bears the human cost of irresponsible design? At the end of the day, it’s us.

While this is the first case in a series of other legal actions, it certainly feels like a first step towards measures that will ultimately put human wellbeing ahead of profit. But let’s not count on it.

In the meantime, designers should remember the influence that they wield. And everyone else? Well, here’s what I’m reminding myself to do every day…

Hi. Hello! Welcome. A Design Perspective is a space for ideas, conversations and deep dives into architecture, design media, sustainability and the creative process.

I’m a design journalist, former magazine editor, ex-interior designer (briefly), founder of About Futures, a platform for regenerative design. And co-host of Creative or Dead. I write here to look at creative work – and the built environment – beyond the algorithm.

It’s free to subscribe, so I hope you stick around!

Aleesha x

Also find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

1. Exactly what an atelic goal is (more on that below), and

2. That there will always be a tension between a deadline and trying to be creative without one

Over the past month, I’ve been head down writing a book that’s due in early March. I’ve always worked well with deadlines (a decade in publishing will have that kind of Pavlovian response.)

With the big manuscript deadline looming overhead, I found myself trying to race to the finish line, treating it like every other piece of commissioned work I write. The tragedy is that I love the process of writing. It’s something I will do every day of my life because I find it deeply fulfilling – so why was I trying to get to the end of my very own book as quickly as possible?

Philosophers have a concept for this tension – telic and atelic. Telic activities are goal-oriented, they exist to be completed. Finish the book (guilty!), launch the project, just work hard until you get that promotion, reach the ultimate milestone.

Atelic activities, however, have no natural endpoint. You don’t ‘complete’ a conversation, a session of listening to music, or a yoga practice. The value is embedded in the act itself.

Creativity, in its truest form, sits firmly in the atelic camp. Writing, drawing, composing, experimenting, these are processes that gain meaning through the act of doing the thing. Somewhere along the way, between ambition, capitalism and the tyranny of productivity culture, we started treating creative work like a checklist item. Volume and output are the measures of worth, and along the way, immersion got overturned by completion.

MIT Philosopher Kieran Setiya speaks about the human benefit of atelic activities in his book Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, which (full disclosure) I have not read but heard him speaking about on the podcast The Grey Area (a great listen).

Activities such as gardening, recreational sport, reading, or spending unstructured time with friends are associated with lower stress and a greater sense of meaning. Crucially, these benefits aren’t tied to achievement or progress markers, but to presence, which seems so obvious when you think about it.

It also dovetails into the findings around flow states – the periods of deep focus when time feels like it dissolves. Studied extensively by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is most likely to occur during activities undertaken for their own sake, where attention is absorbed by the task rather than split between action and outcome. Creative practice, especially when it can remain atelic, is one of the most reliable pathways into the lauded terrain of flow state.

Yet as we’re pummelled under the acceleration of technology and output, creative industries are seeing diminishing returns by operating like this. Publishing cycles, content calendars, funding rounds and algorithms, these privilege completion over contemplation. Even passion projects can begin to feel like a race, where the businessification of our hobbies eclipses the pleasure of doing the thing.

This is why so many of us feel burned out while technically doing everything ‘right’. We’re hitting goals, shipping work, staying busy, but starving ourselves of experiences that don’t demand an endpoint. Creativity is the first to topple, followed closely by curiosity and joy.

It was fortuitous timing to stumble on this concept in the midst of a pressure-cooker deadline. It reminded me of other projects that bring so much joy. Like the podcast I co-host, Creative or Dead. It’s resolutely atelic.

We record because we want to sit with interesting people. And through the process, each conversation teaches us something unexpected, questions lead to more questions. The value isn’t in the episode going live, but rather in the exchange itself. The act of listening.

Ironically, these are the projects that tend to endure. They’re not built around extraction or urgency, which of course means they’re slow burns. By removing the obsession with the finish line, there’s room for depth. And for the kind of thinking that can’t be rushed without losing its texture.

There’s a reason why the cliché – “it’s about the journey not the destination” – has been a poster child saying for so long. That’s usually the way with cliches though, right? They’re repeatable, compressed, eye-rolling truth bombs.

I’m still finishing the book. The deadline is an immovable moment, but I’m attempting to enjoy it like a cruisey ride on a winding road with the top down.

Hi. Hello! Welcome. A Design Perspective is a space for ideas, conversations and deep dives into architecture, design media, sustainability and the creative process.

I’m a design journalist, former magazine editor, ex-interior designer (briefly), founder of About Futures, a platform for regenerative design. And co-host of Creative or Dead. I write here to look at creative work – and the built environment – beyond the algorithm.

It’s free to subscribe, so I hope you stick around!

Aleesha x

Also find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

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To the untrained eye, it’s page after page of exquisite, desirable homes. The reality is often very different though.

First of all, this is not a criticism of stylists. It’s an observation of the way media operates whereby so many interior design projects look eerily the same, right down to the Artemide Shogun light and TOGO sofa.

As an interior designer, it’s a big moment to photograph your work and send it out to a magazine. What some people may not realise is the extent to which a home can be transformed through editorial styling. A client’s entire home contents dispensed into boxes to make way for a truckload of new things, all just to get the perfect pictures.

If you’ve ever wondered why so many interiors feel uncannily alike, this is all part of the illusion. In design media, this practice is almost a given if you want to get published in the top tier magazines. Many photographers won’t work without a stylist, and trust me, I get it, I’ve seen the recce shots with the ugly Lazyboy recliners and patchwork of mismatching photo frames that look more like a great aunts hoarding rather than a stylish expression of ‘home’.

The need for editorial styling is to create cohesion, where all of the furniture and accessories work together as a complete whole, as if this is how the inhabitants live everyday. While this creates a strong design language, there is a certain kind of sameness that permeates. Not to mention the lack of authenticity. These manufactured images are intended to illicit desire and aspiration, but what so many people don’t realise is that none of it is real. Or how these people actually live. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

To the credit of stylists, it takes incredible skill and project management to pull this feat off. The logistics, let alone the schlepping and lugging and finessing. It’s demanding work, and the pressure is immense. The stylist’s job is to translate a spatial idea into a visual language that reads swiftly and seductively on the page. But it’s like an unspoken open secret that most images bear only a passing resemblance to the lives they supposedly depict.

Because stylists have a network of furniture suppliers they have relationships with, and because suppliers have somewhat limited pieces for loaning out to shoots, you end up seeing a lot of the same things.

You might start to notice the repetition; the same ceramic vessel perched on the coffee table. Softly folded linens in exactly the shade of washed eucalyptus that photographs best. It raises an uncomfortable question: do we genuinely like these pieces, or have we been trained to see patterns and recognise them through sheer exposure?

Taste formed by the algorithm isn’t new, but design media has been curating collective desire long before social feeds took over. It becomes more surreal when you consider our current visual landscape – where images themselves can’t always be trusted. (If you’ve seen the latest version of nano banana, you know what I mean.) Yet long before AI blurred the edges of reality, our interior imagery was already operating in a register of fiction. The homes we flip through are usually not the homes their owners live in. It’s a theatre of desire.

So what happens when that illusory curtain drops? What does a real, lived-in space actually look like?

In spite of the fugly recliner, the answer is far more interesting. Bookshelves that carry both rare monographs and a yellowing paperback your uncle handed you five years ago. The framed child’s drawing popped next to an armchair scavenged from a flea market. In my time at Habitus, I would seek out these spaces, whether submitted by the photographer/designer, or by openly asking people if we could feature their home. It can be found in the enduring appeal of Apartamento. Spaces that are layered, contradictory, imperfect, which is precisely why they’re deeply compelling. They’re human.

Design has drifted into the realm of a commodity, another way to identity flex. But the reason the Camaleonda, or the TOGO, or that ubiquitous travertine plinth appeals so strongly is not necessarily because they’re right for your home. It’s because you’ve seen them hundreds of times in highly styled, highly publicised interiors. And perhaps that’s the real illusion: mistaking repeated imagery for authentic preference.

Is there an antidote? It feels like the next generation is already pining for interiors that don’t feel so polished. You can sense it in the rise of eclecticism, in the return of patina, in the growing suspicion of every image you land on.

Maybe the true antidote is to trust your own taste and not be in a rush to fill your home in one go. Homes are accumulations of years, of experiences, of ordinary and extraordinary moments.

The illusion will likely persist, it’s baked into the machinery of how design is communicated. But behind the styled tableaux is a simple truth: the most interesting rooms are the ones that couldn’t be recreated with a van full of props.

Hi. Hello! Welcome. A Design Perspective is a space for ideas, conversations and deep dives into architecture, design media, sustainability and the creative process.

I’m a design journalist, former magazine editor, ex-interior designer (briefly) and founder of About Futures, a platform for regenerative design. I write here to look at creative work – and the built environment – beyond the algorithm.

It’s free to subscribe, so I hope you stick around!

Aleesha x

Also find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

I can’t stop thinking about how to bring some of this essence back. Especially at a time when conversations about housing are dominated by cost, density battles, planning malaise and surface-level trend cycles – it’s worth asking why these older homes still capture the imagination.

Guss House by McGlashan Everist, c1961 – Kew, Melbourne

A time when homes were smaller, simpler, smarter

The mid-century era was by no means a golden design age. It came with its own environmental and social challenges. But many of the homes built between the 1940s and 1970s shared a few qualities that still matter today – perhaps even more so.

1. Footprints were modest

The average home some 70 years ago was compact and functional. Bedrooms were small, and they certainly didn’t all come equipped with an ensuite.

By contrast, the average new Australian home today sits at around 230–240 square metres, putting them among the largest in the world (see this by the CSIRO). Bigger isn’t inherently worse, but do you really need two living rooms and a rumpus room and a cinema room.

Why do we feel the need to take up so much space? I’m not advocating for tiny homes as much as appreciating the simple fact that small can be beautiful, and is ultimately a more sustainable choice.

Pettigrew House by Robin Boyd, 1946

2. Materials made the design

Building houses in the mid-20^th century was one of necessity, innovation and constraint. Because of material shortages after the war, architects and designers had to get creative and simply work with what was available.

That often meant working with simple materials, but finding ways to experiment. Brick, timber, daggy linoleum – they’re not necessarily luxury, but there was a level of quality and durability. ‘Less but better’ was often the mantra (and of course still is today for some of the more reputable architects).

Now, however, it’s not uncommon to see an owner-developer row of townhouses with brick face (just a fake façade of brick), mixed with painted timber, zinc and a whole slew of materials mashed together. As well as cheap substitutes.

What will be interesting to watch is how some of these new builds age – will they be viable for repair, or need to be completely replaced?

3. Landscape was part of the architecture

Mid-century homes, even in suburbia, tended to sit lightly on the land and consider the way a garden will grow in. They respected slope, vegetation and garden space – especially in a little enclave such as Studley Park, which has steep, unusual terrain for Melbourne.

Rather than building to the absolute limit of the legal boundaries of a site, more often than not, these houses were modest (see point 1), allowing breathing room and green to engulf the dwelling. The backyard, even the front yard, wasn’t an afterthought squeezed into the leftover meterage from a supersized building footprint.

So what changed?

Housing today sits inside a complex web of market pressures, planning constraints, building codes, supply chains and cultural expectations (the classic adage of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’.)

The typical criticism that “new houses are ugly” often misses this bigger picture. Looking at the macro implications, there are things like:

• Builders are asked to deliver ever-larger homes at price points that barely allow for good materials.

• Planning rules can make thoughtful density nearly impossible, pushing developers to build out, not up.

• Cultural norms tell us more space equals more success.

• Not to mention the ever-presence of resale value.

• And sustainability, while valued, is often treated as a checklist rather than the starting point.

All of these factors have left us in a place where looking around the new outer ring neighbourhoods, it is too easy to simply call them ugly.

But design integrity means nothing if only 10 percent of the population can afford it.

A later Robin Boyd house, love the glimpse of green that peeks through

Reclaiming what was lost (and reinventing it)

The point of looking back isn’t to replicate the 1950s. It’s to re-learn the fundamentals. Imagine if Australia’s next generation of homes were built around modest footprints, passive design, durable materials and places that people can truly build community. Or if sustainability wasn’t something tacked on at the end, but embedded from the very beginning.

We don’t need to fetishise breeze blocks or obsess over original cork tiles. But we can hold onto the core lessons that have been there for decades – build smaller, build smarter, build for longevity, and respect the site.

And it’s just as important to recognise that improving housing quality isn’t only a design problem; it’s a planning, and supply chain, and cultural reprogramming, and a sustainability problem too.

The challenge (and with it the beautiful opportunity) is to take those lessons and build in a way that feels generous, equitable and enduring.

Hi. Hello! Welcome. A Design Perspective is a space for ideas, conversations and deep dives into architecture, design media, sustainability and the creative process.

I’m a design journalist, former magazine editor, ex-interior designer (briefly) and founder of About Futures, a platform for regenerative design. I write here to look at creative work – and the built environment – beyond the algorithm.

It’s free to subscribe, so I hope you stick around!

Aleesha x

Also find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

I was so honoured (and definitely nervous), to be the first cab off the rank as a speaker for this initiative. In preparation for the 30-minute talk, I collected all the thinking and experiences I’ve had over the past decade or so and pulled them into one coherent idea – here’s a condensed version.

Storytelling as the first design tool

Our First Nations people have been sharing stories about Country for over 60,000 years.

These stories communicate complex systems of ecological and moral law. They encode everything from kinship structures to land management, seasonal change, hunting practices, spiritual belief.

It’s through storytelling that this knowledge has lived – and survived. Storytelling is an innately human instinct.

Jump forward a few more thousand years to the Chauvet caves in France. These caves were discovered in the 90s, and it’s incredible really that they’ve remained intact for tens of thousands of years. [As an aside, yes, these are the ones as featured in the Werner Herzog documentary ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’.]

Inside, drawings of animals line the walls, and there’s evidence that fires were lit turning these walls into a screen of dynamism and movement. Could this have been the first cinema?

History shows us that we’ve never just built shelter, we’ve used our homes to tell stories about who we are, and what matters. So even before we had tools, or weapons – before CAD and 3D printing – humans made stories.

You could almost say storytelling was one of the first design tools.

Every space tells a story

Every space communicates something, whether a designer means to or not. Storytelling is not an extra to add on at the end. It’s already baked into what designers do.

So rather than unintentionally sending the wrong message, why not harness it? It can help make better design decisions and also help to communicate the meaning and purpose behind the work.

As an example, let’s look at two churches – two churches that both use concrete, both sculpt light in unique, interesting ways. But are they telling the same story?

While this can be subjective, I would argue that Tadao Ando’s Church of Light evokes a sense of contemplation and introspection. It’s quiet and soft, humble in its simplicity. Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus chapel features the imprint of the charred, burnt logs – scarring the interior – it feels overpowering and heavy, making you feel small and insignificant, contained.

Every design decision you make should add to the narrative you’re shaping through space.

Design storytelling in action

What is the narrative being expressed at Parliament House?

1. The form nestles into the ground, set atop a hill. But the gently sloping rooftops are accessible. This is all about the idea that in a fully functioning, democratic society, the people should be above government. And so here, everyday citizens can, literally, walk above the seat of parliament.

2. The curving arcs are intended to be reminiscent of a boomerang shape, as a connection to Indigenous storytelling. Obviously, it’s worth noting that this was designed in the 80s. But what stands out is that a boomerang shape feels derivative these days. It shows how a design that doesn’t think deeply can quickly lose touch, which might be fine for a retail fitout, but not for a civic building that needs to stand for hundreds of years.

The origin story: Eames’ plywood prototyping

The LCW Chair by the Eames is an incredible innovation in bent plywood. This was only possible because Ray and Charles Eames mastered their plywood bending technique by making emergency splints for soldiers during World War II.

It’s a beautiful example of how process can be an incredible mechanism for storytelling.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been shown a chair, or an interior or even a building that looks like any other thing – but when I hear the process that went into it, there’s a whole new level of appreciation. The thinking and resolution to get it to the final output is oftentimes the most compelling part.

The sad part is that we’re in a time where it’s all about capturing attention in a glimpse on TikTok or Instagram. And through this, we reduce that work – the how, the why, the countless agonising hours – into nothing more than a blip.

Martino Gamper found a constraint and documented it

Italian industrial designer Martino Gamper collected old, broken chairs off the street, and reassembled them into new forms.

That on its own is somewhat interesting. But it’s been done before. So, he upped the ante by designing one every day for 100 days.

The result was 100 Chairs in 100 Days – a joyful, chaotic, often awkward collection of hybrid chairs. This experiment brought him worldwide acclaim. Each one tells a different story – about failure, reuse, improvisation, process. It’s a reminder that not every design needs to be polished to be powerful.

It also gave him guardrails to work within. Through necessity and constraint, he created something original. You don’t need much else to make that an inspiring insight. By documenting and sharing the process along the way, the story pretty much told itself.

Consistency compounds your message

Often thought of as a dirty word in design, there is value in creating a language for your work – through form, light, material and detail – you can start to express a clear message.

India Mahdavi does this exceptionally well. Her rooms could be considered characters – playful, dramatic – designed with attitude. She captures an emotional narrative, and expresses it through bold palettes, curated materials, and vibrant texture combinations. She thinks of colour as a type of language, and puts them in conversation or conflict with one another.

In interviews, she’s often identified her upbringing – living in multiple countries – as the influence on her design. She uses her personal experience, heritage and values to anchor her design work. And by finding and repeating it in new ways, the message can get through.

On the flip side of this, I hear from many creatives who share that they don’t want to be pigeon-holed as one thing. Countless times I’ve heard ‘we don’t have a house style’ and yet there is a clear through line.

It’s not necessarily about being cookie-cutter or doing the same template of work, it’s deeper than that.

If you can find your throughline, whatever it is – colour, forms, process – that can be the foundation of what you stand for as a designer. And people start to notice and remember you for it.

So how to put all of this thinking into action?

In part two, I’ll share the techniques, templates and tools I presented at Extra Credit that you can try to help craft more compelling narratives about your design work.

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Hi. Hello! Welcome. This is a space for ideas, conversations and deep dives into design, creativity and culture. It’s free to subscribe, so I hope you stick around.

I’m a design journalist – once an interior designer (for a hot second), then a magazine editor, now a podcast host, and founder of a platform for regenerative design – About Futures. I write here to explore the nuances of creative work beyond the algorithm.

I also work with select clients – find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

Her replacement has been revealed, and with it a title change. Chloe Malle is Vogue’s new head of editorial content. A title that is fittingly vague and all-encompassing. No longer constrained to just overseeing the direction of a print title, in this new era, head of editorial content includes all permutations of outlets. And with the proliferation of media, that means social channels, video, podcasts, online and of course, the loved but waning print format.

In the announcement on The New York Times, Malle’s pitch for the role reportedly outlined a new direction for print – a reduction in the number of issues per year, with each centred on milestone moments and made with a thicker paper stock to make them more collectable and valuable.

For digital, Malle proposes niching down rather than merely chasing numbers. Which is a full 180, considering she reportedly doubled the traffic to vogue.com during her tenure as digital editor.

All of this signals what I’ve written about before – in a time of 'more is more' and content overload, the only way to halt the race to the bottom is to take the proverbial foot off the gas and focus on quality rather than quantity. It’s never been easier to spit out tepid content, but heaping more onto the pile won’t necessarily get your message through any clearer.

The death of print has been proclaimed since the advent of the internet, and while newspapers were the first to succumb, print across both books and magazines has fared less tragically throughout the past few decades. But changes have been atomising in the air.

My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that we will continue to see smaller niches and artful titles burst onto the scene – some will survive and evolve, others will serve a cultural moment and burn out.

But the one-size-fits-all publication has no place in people’s fragmented and attention-deprived lives. The value is in the creative, original and commercial-free ventures that feel naïve, because they will be. For legacy publications, this means getting clear on purpose and point of difference. Finding the time to read a magazine is a luxury, so how do you turn it into an experience? It’s this line of thinking that Vogue appears to be traversing.

Where will it all land? I’m intrigued to watch and curious to know what other people think.

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Hi. Hello! Welcome. This is a space for ideas, conversations and deep dives into design, creativity and culture. It’s free to subscribe, so I hope you stick around.

I’m a design journalist – once an interior designer (for a hot second), then a magazine editor, now a podcast host, and founder of a platform for regenerative design – About Futures. I write here to explore the nuances of creative work beyond the algorithm.

I also work with select clients – find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

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At a point where climate change is only one of the many pressing issues of our time, my goal is to build a place to be inspired by possibilities that bring hope – a design future that isn’t based on extractive, finite resources.

With the deluge of information growing every second, where does About Futures fit in the wider context of a perennially online world? Ultimately, I want to build something with purpose, without burning myself out in the process.

As information floods our day-to-day, the demand for attention is a suffocating pressure. It can leave people, myself included, in a state of constant frazzle, doom scrolling, worrying about forgetting – or missing – important things.

About Futures is run by just me (at least for now). And I feel that pressure to churn. To have a content calendar with articles, social media and newsletters coming out three times a week. To produce more and more and more, just to compete to keep up.

But that isn’t sustainable. It isn’t sustainable for me, and most importantly, I don’t want to shovel more onto that heap.

Instead, this is a platform of critical assessment and curation.

It’s slow and measured.

It is a space to share helpful, practical information about regenerative design, processes and materials.

That means taking time to find, source and share the things that are worthy. It means irregularity, stopping and starting. The antithesis of how most publications are run.

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

It was through my own background in design and architecture media that I stumbled into the world of bio-materiality and was truly excited for the potential of what a new era of design could look like – a future that puts the health of people and planet before profit.

It was this experience that also showed me the fallacies and flaws in the publishing system, the tied hands because of vested interests. A traditional structure that makes critical thinking nearly impossible.

While About Futures is currently funded entirely by me, it will need financial support at some point, but I will do so ethically and transparently.

I want to build a space where community and quality always come first.

THE IMPERFECT SUBJECT MATTER

Writing about sustainability is inherently fraught. There is no perfectly sustainable framework or material; it’s about fit-for-purpose and the right compromise. And anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is a snake oil salesperson.

Even to get to this point, I’ve been overwhelmed with imposter syndrome. The Dunning-Kruger effect rearing itself up constantly. Reading a scientific journal article explaining the thermal conductivity of hempcrete and comprehending only 20% will no doubt do that.

But I don’t claim to be an expert in all things, simply a conduit of information. My skill is in words. In translating and parlaying information in a way that is easy to understand and read.

The information out there about sustainability is oftentimes confusing and contradictory. My goal is to help break that down and make it accessible.

While still in the early phases, every business and material listed on the directory is vetted and assessed against a criterion, and that criteria will be made public on the platform (item 9 on the very long to-do list hahah).

There is a long way to go. A big part of why I haven’t wanted to share too much up to now is the simple fact that there is still so much more I want to do, and it needs the time and focus to realise it. The other part is fear, see above re: imposter syndrome.

So…

It makes so much more sense, at least to me, to operate in a way that aligns with the very thing I’m writing about. At the end of the day, I’m a human, not a machine running to an endless schedule. In this vein, I’m nervously excited to build a publication about regenerative design that is slow, intentional, accessible and informative.

If this resonates with you, it would mean so much if you share it with anyone in your network who might be interested. Every little bit will help me grow this thing organically, with the integrity that this topic needs.

You can see the full site at aboutfutures.co and I would love to know if there are features or functionality you’d be interested in seeing.

Hi. Hello! Welcome. This is a space for ideas, conversations and deep dives into design, creativity and culture. It’s free to subscribe, so I hope you stick around.

I’m a design journalist – once an interior designer (for a hot second), then a magazine editor, now a podcast host, and founder of a platform for regenerative design – About Futures. I write here to explore the nuances of creative work beyond the algorithm.

I also work with select clients – find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

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Every time I sat down to write each piece in this series, I had an insistent feeling of the elephant in the room not being addressed.

Having the luxury to contemplate the psychology of home is only possible when you’re in a position of safety and security in this most intimate of environments, and I’m acutely aware that this is a privilege not everyone has.

The most obvious framework for this is, of course, Maslow’s Hierarchy. Laid right across the bottom are physiological needs – shelter.

If you’ve ever watched Alone, the first thing every contestant does, especially in the freezing cold, is build a shelter. This tracks when considering the rule of 3s in survival: 3 minutes without air, 3 hours in exposure, 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food. After literally breathing, shelter is the single most important human need.

And yet homelessness in Australia is high relative to our population, and especially as an OECD nation. According to the 2021 Census, 122,000 people experienced homelessness on the night of the survey. This puts the homeless rate at 48 per 10,000 in 2021, up from 45 in 2006.

At the basest level, shelter is the threshold between vulnerability and survival, but it’s so easy to take it for granted. Before accumulating a lifetime of décor, objects and heirloom furniture, we must first acknowledge the undeniable importance of its protection.

Modern life has complicated the true need of a home. Housing has become a commodity, a measure of wealth rather than a human right. We speak of property ladders, investment portfolios, market trends. All while the number of people without secure shelter continues to rise. I was shocked to learn recently that the most at-risk people are women aged 55 and older. According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, this group was the fastest-growing demographic to fall into homelessness and insecure housing, with reasons ranging from age discrimination at work, the gap in wealth accumulation over a lifetime, exposure to domestic abuse, and the shortage of affordable housing.

And this doesn’t even factor in that home ownership is getting further and further from being possible for younger people. In figures released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, home ownership among 25–29‑year‑olds fell from 50% in 1971 to just 36% in 2021, and for those aged 30–34 from 64% to 50% in the same period.

Add into the mix a housing crisis exacerbated by a shortfall in supply, caused by declining construction approvals, increasing build times and rising costs. It paints a clear picture of how the very foundations of ‘home’ feel to be on shaky ground for many.

Yet the allure and impact of creating a home, a nest, cannot be underestimated. Home is where the self can retreat, and where the threshold between the outside world and the inner one is held.

Along with the United Nations, I truly believe it’s a human right worth standing up for.

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Hi. Hello! Welcome. This is a space for ideas, conversations and deep dives into design, creativity and culture. It’s free to subscribe, so I hope you stick around.

I’m a design journalist – once an interior designer (for a hot second), then a magazine editor, now a podcast host, and founder of a platform for regenerative design – About Futures. I write here to explore the nuances of creative work beyond the algorithm.

I also work with select clients – find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

Are our homes a reflection of self? Absolutely. But what about home being a projection of who we aspire to be?

Carl Jung’s concept of ‘Individuation’ encapsulates this, albeit he wasn’t speaking directly about a nice rug, or a new floor lamp. For Jung, Individuation is the search to become whole (psychologically speaking), where we consciously and unconsciously find ways to express our inner truths externally. Jung is also know for his writing on the concept of projection – the process of attributing our own unconscious feelings, thoughts, desires and fears onto other people or things. Perhaps it’s a tenuous link, but this made me think about how objects can be the carriers of meaning – where personal artefacts are an extension of our memory, identity and desire.

The idea of using our homes to project a certain version of ourselves is evidenced most acutely (in my opinion) by the fact that you can hire a book curator to fill your bookshelves with only the best literature. I guess the same could be said for art, but for some reason, I understand why you might consult an expert on art. For books, it seems unnecessary… just read what you like. Alas, we come full circle to my point – that the objects we surround ourselves with are projections of our idealised self.

What we display, what we hide, what we invest in, all of this ‘stuff’ that we live with reveals something about who we are or want to be. Even Virginia Woolf’s titular ‘room’ isn’t literal, it’s symbolic. Our homes are a container for becoming. And if we can project ourselves into that space with intention, we give ourselves the permission to change.

I often speak to designers and architects about the concept of future-proofing. Designing in a manner that allows a space to change alongside the changes that happen throughout life. A kids’ playroom that will morph into a study zone, or a detached studio to run a small business that could, at a different time, be used as a granny flat. This is just smart design. But it also alludes to the future versions and dynamics that might inhabit it. Within this adaptable, use-agnostic container, our belongings act as symbols of inner states or unconscious drives.

Having been a design magazine editor, I’ve felt the pressure to have a home that is laden with only the best furniture, decor and art. To project the stereotype of someone at the vanguard, at times, it was incredibly stifling. The truth is, my home, like most people, is a hodgepodge of things. A rickety side table from my sharehouse days, one piece of art I bought during Covid, and a lot of books – all messily, gloriously on display.

What things are lurking in your home that encapsulate all the different sides of who you are?

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Hi. Hello! Welcome. This is a space for ideas, conversations and deep dives into design, creativity and culture. It’s free to subscribe, so I hope you stick around.

I’m a design journalist – once an interior designer (for a hot second), then a magazine editor, now a podcast host, and founder of a platform for regenerative design – About Futures. I write here to explore the nuances of creative work beyond the algorithm.

I also work with select clients – find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

Homes are just as full of memories as what we store in our minds. The spaces we inhabit, like a lingering scent, are a container for our memories.

Our environments, our homes especially, are a stage for life’s stories. In this sense, memory is not linear – it’s spatial.

French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty explored this very concept in the 1940s, writing that perception is an embodied experience. He argued that we experience the world not from a distance but through our lived, physical presence. We’re not merely an object in space, rather our perception is the foundation of all knowledge, and we’re constantly capturing it through our bodily experiences.

With this interpretation, a home isn’t just a backdrop for memory. It is memory. We internalise spaces through our senses, and in turn, it shapes how we remember ourselves.

Merleau-Ponty was, of course, a huge influence on Finnish architect and writer Juhani Pallasmaa, whose iconic book The Eyes of Skin – Architecture and the Senses has influenced architects for decades.

Pallasmaa similarly writes that architects should be experience makers, rather than image makers. By prioritising the sensory experience, designers can create spaces with deeper meaning. Spaces that have the power to capture memory.

It’s a rather poignant reminder, particularly when we’re in a moment when the seduction of the 2-dimensional image is so pronounced. The experience of scanning and double-tapping an image on Instagram is a detached and disembodied action, hardly capable of making it into the long-term memory.

However, the rituals of life playing out within the safety of your four walls are like a Super 8 film for memory making. Even the smallest of details can hold weight: the mug with a broken handle, the layer of dust over the shelf of books, a skeletal apple tree that still somehow manages to produce fruit. These things might seem trivial, but they function as memory prompts, like the lingering scent of Jasmine on a warm summer night, they bring time folding back in on itself.

On the flip side, you could say that homes can also trap memory. A house once filled with love can feel hollowed out after loss. Our environments turn into a kind of psychological archive, piled with grief, nostalgia, or anxiety. Perhaps there’s something to be said for moving as a means of forgetting.

Yet even when we leave a place, we continue to carry its imprint. I know I can remember the layouts and features of nearly every home I’ve lived in, and the different versions of me that resided there.

Do you associate a particular home with a strong memory?

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Welcome! This is a space for ideas, conversations and deeper dives into design, creativity and culture. It’s free to subscribe, so stick around.

I’m a design journalist – once an interior designer (for a hot second), then a magazine editor, now a solopreneur and podcast host. I write here to explore the nuances of creative work beyond the algorithm.

I also work with select clients – find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

I moved around a lot as a kid. Reflecting on it now, I think that’s part of what drew me to interior design. The experience of inhabiting many houses meant I could keep a tally of what felt right and what didn’t. Unconsciously accumulating intel for an unknown point in the future.

I recently finished reading Deborah Levy’s living memoir trilogy, which culminates in the final book, Real Estate. Aside from being obsessed with her style of prose, this book, in particular, has really stuck with me. In it, she writes about her imagined ‘unreal estate’, a house of her dreams that doesn’t exist. A house, for her, is not just bricks and mortar but a site of self, somewhere a person can fully inhabit their contradictions. It’s not so much the acquisition of property, but the claiming of space literally and psychologically. It also reminded me of a game I used to play when I couldn’t get to sleep as a 10-year-old. I would imagine, in minute detail, my own dream house – or in Levy’s words, my ‘unreal estate’. I would pick and choose my favourite parts of the houses we had lived in and friends’ places I’d visited. In my mind, I conjured grand staircases and cosy nooks, and would inevitably fall asleep before moving through every possible room and hallway.

Similarly, in The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard considers home as a container for the daydream. (And a lovely reference in Levy’s Real Estate). Bachelard extols that our homes are vessels of idleness and imagination. A home isn’t just where we sleep, it’s where we project ourselves, where memories layer in the banality of life’s tasks and rituals. The corner cupboard full of appliances that never get used, a favourite chair where the sun comes in – each is personal and holds a kind of intimacy that transcends function.

And yet, shelter is one of our most basic needs. At its core, a home is protection: from inclement weather, yes, but also from the gaze of the world. It’s human nature to beautify our environments. We decorate and curate, folding each worn linen sheet and book on the shelf into our identity. We light candles. We frame photographs. We paint the walls in colours that feel uniquely expressive.

The irony is, while we strive to make homes feel permanent, they rarely are. Homes, like life, are always in a constant state of flux – a work in progress. And perhaps that’s the point. Homes are something we construct, not only in a physical sense, but through our indivdual agglomeration of memory and meaning.

As a topic that has seemingly been bobbing around in my head for decades, I would love to know what others think.

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Welcome! This is a space for ideas, conversations and deeper dives into design, creativity and culture. It’s free to subscribe, so stick around.

I’m a design journalist – once an interior designer (for a hot second), then a magazine editor, now a solopreneur and podcast host. I write here to explore the nuances of creative work beyond the algorithm.

I also work with select clients – find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

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There’s no doubt that modernism came with its fair share of challenges and failures. Corbusier’s Villa Savoye had a notoriously leaky roof, but it laid the path to establishing the technical requirements for flat roof designs. Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe, while stunning in its glassy purity is not pleasant to inhabit given its difficulty to keep warm, and has flooded several times. These buildings weren’t perfect, but they were necessary stepping stones to create a new design language, using the newest materials of the time. Without stretching the limits, the profession couldn’t evolve.

Jump forward to today, it feels harder for architecture to be brave. Architects aren’t just tasked with imagining better buildings, they have to convince the client to pursue an unconventional idea, then keep the builder accountable to see it through. Bubbling away in the background are layers of red tape, the burden of liability and rising insurance premiums.

Architects carry the highest level of professional insurance on a project. They shoulder the weight of the building – figuratively and literally – even in cases where builders substitute materials or specifications without notice. Plus, razor-thin profit margins mean pushing for sustainable or alternative methods can devolve into a love job, carried out in service of the idea, not the bottom line.

As specialisation has increased, the role of the architect has been sliced thinner and thinner. Now just one player in a growing field of consultants, they must navigate a room of voices but still bear the most responsibility.

And yet we need better architecture more than ever. In the face of climate catastrophe, design must step up. We need a new movement of architecture, one that’s just as bold as modernism, this time driven by climate-conscious thinking.

There’s no shortage of material innovation. Net-zero, even carbon-positive buildings are no longer a dream. A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited to a dinner at Joost Bakker’s Future Food System at Fed Square, a prototype home that uses biochar-infused paint, compressed straw walls by Durra Panel, and is integrated with fully self-sufficient food systems. It’s a house, yes, but it’s also an invitation to try new ways of building.

While I’m no architect, I’ve been inspired by the possibilities of a new design era and am excited to share a project I’ve been quietly working away at for the past 12 months — About Futures, a platform to showcase, highlight and share new materials, high-performance architecture and regenerative thinking.

It’s still in the early days. There’s a lot more to add, and I’m sure it will continue to morph over time, but it’s a start. Sometimes the imperfect thing is better than nothing.

I hope you check it out – all feedback is very welcome.

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Welcome! This is a space for ideas, conversations and deeper dives into design, creativity and culture. It’s free to subscribe, so stick around.

I’m a design journalist – once an interior designer, then a magazine editor, now a solopreneur and podcast host. I write here to explore the nuances of creative work beyond the algorithm.

I also work with select clients – find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

Of course, there are arguments for and against on both. I’ve always believed being a generalist with at least one area of expert knowledge is the way to go. It’s often described as the T – wide, broad knowledge, albeit somewhat shallow, along the top with one specific area that you go deep on. It’s a term that was popularised in the 90s by Tim Brown, the iconic CEO of IDEO (who is also credited with the concept of ‘design thinking’). References to a T-Shape Man can also be found from the consulting firm McKinsey & Co in the 80s.

The diagram I would give successful architecture and design studios is a variation of the T. Something more like T+ where you have the business and operations along the top, with each sector coming down, essentially like a series of Ts all lined up together.

The benefits of this became apparent during the pandemic, where the practices with several areas of speciality fared better because they could up the pipeline of jobs in one sector to offset the lack in another. For example, a studio that did both residential and workplace fitouts could go for more residential projects to counterbalance the massive implosion to the commercial sector. On the other hand, a specialist workplace interior design firm without any other speciality had to quickly adapt and diversify.

While this hybrid combination has been the status quo, I’ve recently started to wonder if this will continue to be the future of work when considering the rise of AI as a generalist’s tool. Given AI is prone to hallucinations, there is a real need for hyper-specialists to fact-check and validate.

As a random but relevant aside – a few years ago, I was at the launch of Fender Katsalidis’ new monograph, a beautiful publication by Uro that traces the studio’s significant works, of which there are many dotted around Melbourne. As the architects behind the famous MONA gallery in Hobart, David Walsh attended and gave a speech, much to the delight of everyone there. Walsh spoke about the development of a new building they were working on together, a hotel and library (which was meant to be completed in 2024 🤷‍♀️). When talking about this new library, Walsh mentioned being inspired by the world’s first library in ancient Mesopotamia. I don’t remember the specifics, but one of the wait staff standing near me started to snigger and shake his head. I looked at him quizzically and he leaned in and quietly said: “I’m doing my PhD on [insert some very very specific thing about Mesopotamia], and I can tell you for fact everything he just said is bullshit.” I was shocked. Of course, if you didn’t have that very specific, deep knowledge, you would have no idea whether Walsh was spitting babble or sounding incredibly well-read. Considering the way in which the entire crowd was eating out of the palm of his hand, I would go with the latter.

The point is that we need specialists in the world. We need people who obsess over the minutiae, the history, who geek out on something and know it back to front. As AI gobbles up a universe of data, I believe there will be a place for the specialist who has dedicated their life to a topic and can say with certainty whether something is accurate and correct. At least for the foreseeable.

I would love to know what you think. Also because perhaps counterintuitively, I remain a steadfast T-shape. I don’t have the obsessive personality to stick to one thing, and one thing only, as evidenced by the broad range of topics covered on this Substack 😆

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Welcome! This is a space for ideas, conversations and deeper dives into design, creativity and culture. It’s free to subscribe, so stick around.

I’m a design journalist – once an interior designer, then a magazine editor, now a solopreneur and podcast host. I write here to explore the nuances of creative work beyond the algorithm.

I also work with select clients – find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

In an age of incessant personal documentation, I could count on one hand the number of people who weren’t capturing the entire thing on a device. The driving compulsion to whip out a phone and snap off photos and videos was undeniable. And I’m the first to put my hand up and say I felt the need to get at least a few cute selfies.

But what is all this footage for? Is it merely a tick of social recognition to prove you were there, or perhaps a way to outsource memories?

When I looked across the mirrored box and saw someone else’s footage through their screen, I was struck by the way this immersive, full-body experience of sounds, lights and reflections was transmuted into a tiny version. A two-dimensional chimera that translated the colours and forms in perfect proportion but missed the deeper feeling – the way the senses tingle, the delight and vertigo of an unspooling fractal-like reflection.

The same can be said for a special dining experience. And again, I’m often guilty of halting anyone grabbing food off a plate in order to get the perfect snapshot. While it’s somewhat innocuous at the small scale, the deeper questions come when zooming out.

The experience of watching on a screen will never compare to IRL. But what else do we miss when experiencing life through a lens? There is already research confirming that prolonged use of digital screens can cause Computer Vision Syndrome, where the eyes strain and deteriorate.

Posing a potential future evolutionary change as a thought starter – could our senses start to atrophy if all our experiences are channelled through a screen? A case of if you don’t use it, you lose it. I mean, I sure hope not!

For most of the past decade, interior designers have been tasked with creating Instagram moments. Which is unsurprising given that the skill of a designer is in activating and shaping the senses, bringing together the perfect fusion of lights, sounds and smells to illicit a physical response.

In our digital age, this is more important than ever. But as the world shouts, being able to curate spaces for contemplation and quietness is just as crucial, which is a similar tangent to a recent essay I wrote about immersion being a luxury. Spaces that actively encourage putting the phone away and being present in the moment.

And increasingly, I’m finding the joy in consciously building ‘core memories’ by using my senses to remember the special moments unfolding right in front of me.

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Thanks for reading! A Design Perspective is a space for sharing ideas, sparking conversations and exploring the intersecting layers of design, creativity and culture. It’s free to subscribe – so if you’re curious, stick around.

I’m a design journalist and content strategist, originally an interior designer, later a magazine editor, and now navigating the world as a solopreneur and podcast host. I write here to dig deeper and follow threads of curiosity.

I also work with selected clients, helping them shape strategies for impact, and craft words that resonate. You can find me at aleeshacallahan.com.

This week I’m inspired by creativity as David Constantine and I are gearing up for the next season of our podcast Creative or Dead. Have a listen, if you you haven’t already tuned in.

The traditional barriers to entry for creative output have been left at the wayside. The 2000s blogging boom allowed writers to publish their work freely and readily, MySpace and YouTube welcomed an era of bedroom-produced music discoveries. But we’re now on the other side of this democratisation of culture. We’re on the downward slope of the bell curve.

Along with levelling the playing field (which is a good thing), this explosion of accessibility has also opened the floodgates. Now the challenge is how to face the onslaught of this output. It’s now harder than ever to wade through the surfeit and find the nuggets, the gems of incredible quality and originality in art, design, music, writing – any creative field.

And a question I’ve been pondering a lot lately is whether this deluge has a trickle-down effect on taste? Is quality harder to come by? This only raises more questions, such as how is quality defined? Is something considered quality when it’s error-free and efficient, or is it about being beautiful and unique?

If we measure quality purely by efficiency and correctness, then automation and digital perfection would theoretically lead to better art. But I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that what makes the best creative work comes from human flaws – the quirks, mistakes and subjective interpretations that add depth. Perfectly produced music, over-edited photographs, or formulaic writing feel hollow, lacking an emotional rawness that defines true artistry. And for me, quality.

While democratisation has changed who can create, it has not necessarily changed how people perceive and value creative work. Taste remains subjective, influenced by personal experience, culture and social context. The accessibility of creative tools may flood the market with content, but it doesn’t dictate which works will ultimately be the ones to linger long into the future.

The hardest thing to overcome today isn’t being able to produce or even distribute creative work – it’s the ability to be seen within the fray. We’re at the point where the power has shifted from the traditional gatekeepers (publishers, record labels, galleries) to the black box algorithms. And in this environment, the democratisation of creativity has allowed for a richer and more diverse cultural landscape. But it hasn’t replaced the need for discernment.

[Can highly recommend reading this article on the Jencks Foundation website by Mark Wigley – it’s an incredible insight into the legacy of the Evolutionary Tree.]

The swirling rise and fall of movements charts architecture’s interplay with social, political and cultural shifts, plotted along decade-long increments. But there is a layer of undesigned, everyday architecture that moves along the bottom at a steady, undisturbed pace. This is the architecture that deserves another glance.

War Minimal, Revival, Do-It-Yourself, Russian pre-fab, Leisure-Vulgar, Adhocist and Consumer Modern. Down here in the bowels is a note – [80% of environment?] – inferring, although questioningly, if this non-architect-designed segment makes up the majority of the built environment.

Down here is where homes, offices and everyday structures exist, designed not by star architects but by necessity and convention. It’s the architecture that is lived in rather than theorised or canonised.

While the grand gestures of Bauhaus, constructivism and international style surge and recede, it is the spaces of the 80% that deserve a deeper look – the silent, unassuming backdrop of architectural history. These are not the bold statements of high design, but the incremental adjustments and organic developments that define how people actually live and work.

Part of this neglect stems from the media machine. Architectural and design journalism tends to focus on the avant-garde, the radical, the groundbreaking, the best of the best – designs that push boundaries and make statements. Dare I say it, the elite. Yet, for most people, architecture is not a grand theoretical experiment, it’s a double-brick interwar bungalow or a cheaply built owner-builder townhouse development. The latter of which is the type that James Howe gleefully rips apart online.

If we were to redraw the Evolutionary Tree today, it would look very different (and something I might even attempt to draw). Social media has radically altered the way design trends emerge and spread. What once took decades to develop now splinters into micro-trends that rise and fall within months.

Instead of monolithic movements, we now have an atomised landscape of rapidly shifting fads: Japandi, Cottagecore, Dopamine Decor. Unlike the slower, ideological battles that shaped 20th-century architecture, today’s trends are fast, reactive and often ephemeral.

[Read my piece about how it’s impossible to live outside of design trends in today’s hyper-connected online world here.]

Jencks’ original diagram reflects an era when architecture was understood as a series of intellectual and artistic movements. But perhaps the true history of architecture is the one happening in the unexamined spaces – the quiet, constant transformation of domestic and commercial buildings that are architecture through occupation.

As Jencks himself observed, architecture is defined by constant plurality and semi-autonomous movements. Whatever architecture is, it is not one thing.

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There was a real lack of data in terms of actual numbers on how much of the built environment is designed by architects. I had a look into the ABS’ ‘Building Activity’ statistics but it captures the whole sector, not specific to architects. Back in 2022, the then-new national president of the AIA quoted that fewer than 6% of Australian homes are architect-designed.

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Welcome! A Design Perspective is a space for sharing ideas, sparking conversations and exploring the intersecting layers of design, creativity and culture. It’s free to subscribe – so if you’re curious, stick around.

I’m a design journalist and content strategist, originally an interior designer, later a magazine editor, and now navigating the world as a solopreneur and podcast host. I write here to dig deeper and follow threads of curiosity.

I also work with selected clients, helping them shape strategies for impact, and craft words that resonate. You can find me at aleeshacallahan.com.