How is design consumed? Or is it consuming us?

What do people find meaningful today, and how is that changing the way we design? As key aspects of life alter and evolve before our eyes, how are the ways we engage with, value and talk about design and architecture changing?

How does design bring us the ‘experience’ and ‘meaning’ that we crave? But perhaps more critically, how can design embed sustainable consumption into our environments and our lives?

This issue we take a moment to digest design – to ruminate on how we use it to improve the ways we live, how it’s increasingly becoming a sought-after currency, and how its narratives are in ever-greater demand.

A centrepiece of our featured content is the design world’s annual week of weeks in Milan, an ultimate – an increasingly crowded – experience of design immersion in April that revealed many threads for discussion of our theme.

We shine a light on the ways in which design innovation can affect how we consume goods and culture, and create identity. But we also ponder whether it’s time for a design reboot.

What is design’s agency in a world where traditional systems and relationships are broken and blurred? Can design make recycling a must have? Can sustainability principles be the agitator that redefines accepted typologies?

Many of these questions were addressed by the Official Winners of our second edition of the INDE.Awards, which we are proud to present in this issue. The 15 trophy winners and 12 honourable mention recipients were celebrated in Singapore on 22 June in an event that brought together 300 members of the architecture and design industries from far-flung corners of the Asia Pacific region.

Read more about the winners and the program of INDE.Awards fringe events we held here in Singapore on Indesignlive.sg. There are strong regional narratives to digest. Our warmest congratulations to all INDE.Awards 2018 Winners and we hope you enjoy the new issue!