Entries for the INDE.Awards 2022 close this Thursday 31 March at midnight AEDT. Enter now and find your four entry essentials here.

This is your moment to enter, honour your work and your team, gain international exposure for your firm, and put your project work on the global stage.

It’s categories like The Learning Space, The Health And Wellbeing Space, The Design Studio, The Influencer and so many more that help you make history with your work and hero your unique design culture.

Amidst this important industry deadline there has also been plenty happening in our design community. The Melbourne Design Week has wrapped up with over 300 events that took place over a two-week period.

Among the highlights was the announcement of Australian Furniture Design Award (AFDA) winner, Canberra designer Ashley Eriksmoen, with her statement-rich piece entitled The Dream, or: the view from here is both bleak and resplendent.

Also the Melbourne Design Fair which drew together so many design personalities in a single space, and on opening night, that you almost forgot that past two years of relative isolation from one another.

Last week I was lucky enough to lead three important panel discussions, hosted at Techne Architecture + Interior Design (the topic: Art In Design); Gray Puksand (the topic: Designing For Future Workers); and Living Edge with Herman Miller (the topic: The role of architecture and design in a circular economy).

Among many highlights was a portion of the Designing For Future Workers discussion, in which the panellists defined future workers not by generation (for example, Millennials, Boomers or even Gen Z). Instead we, as workers, are defined by our stage of life.

Considerations including lifestyle values and functional working needs relative to certain stages of life will increasingly define how we design people-first, hybrid-friendly work settings that tick the boxes of inclusivity, wellbeing focused, amenity rich and more.

Also another point that was driven home quite clearly: while connectivity, collaboration and community – the three big Cs – are most certainly the key purposes of the office place, it is the quality of a company’s culture that is most critical in enticing workers back to the office.

While we’re on the topic of workplace, we’ve just last week sent the next issue of Indesign magazine, The ‘Hybrid At Work’ Issue, to the printers. It will be on sale from 14 April and you can pre-order your issue here.

I often think of the time we spend reading a magazine as being similar to taking a brain spa. A time for reflection and beauty, space to absorb beautiful curations of images and ideas, and dive deep into topics of substance and insight. If you love magazines for this, too, then you’ll find this issue of Indesign does not disappoint.

We are proud to be the first to share the offices of Afterpay by The Studio* Collaborative, as well as Dexus Place by Warren and Mahoney – to name two projects. We also have powerful thought leadership pieces by the likes of Adam Mundy, global head of design at Geyer. He goes deep on the role of neurodiversity and inclusivity in designing workplaces of the future.

Meanwhile Dr Caroline Noller, CEO and co-founder of The Footprint Company, sheds the light of reality on our net-zero target and looks at how office fit-outs are stacking up against that target. We have lots to work towards.

For all the challenges these last two years have thrown at us – and in many ways still are – the great work and great sense of community has only been strengthened. The human spirit endures, buoyed by great architecture and design.

Enter those INDE.Awards before Thursday night. This is your moment!