When AN Interior was jumpstarted a decade ago, its early editors wanted to explore the concept of “interior” as a condition, which meant a wide range of subject matter was fair game, from high-end residential projects to museums and biennale venues. Over the years, in print and online, the award-winning magazine has grown into a go-to source for insider views

Today, the publication celebrates ten years of covering interiors and design with a special section that invites speculation from our editorial apparatus—meaning, contributions from photographers and writers from around the world. In looking forward to tomorrow’s urgencies, important questions arise: What—and how—should we be looking at when we view design? What are refreshing ways we should be seeing and understanding the world of interior architecture and design? What are our blind spots that should be corrected? What is inspiring enough to lead the way?

AN Interior gathers written reflections from writers, curators, directors, architects, and anthropologists that direct our attention to what we should be addressing with design media. The following written reflections address how we want to envision the future of interiors. Stay tuned for the forthcoming visual reflections by photographers.

Diana Budds

Writer

Consumerism. It’s not a sexy, fun topic. And no one wants to be the scold adjacent to beautiful, joyful, expressive interiors and holy grail furniture. But there’s something nagging about the constant churn of new products, materials that simply don’t last, and waste that trend cycles incentivize. The idea of virtuous consumption also ought to fall by the wayside. The only answer is less of everything.

Alexandra Cunningham Cameron

Curator

Lately, I’ve been thinking about our relationship to nature—not in the grand, sweeping sense of the current crisis, but in the way it plays out alongside the objects we surround ourselves with, the things we consider worth keeping. My interest has always been in material culture, the artifacts of human optimism. Optimism not necessarily in the sense of trying to see good, but in the sense of opting to participate in life, in opting for action over inaction. Given the choice, I’d rather examine a bowl than a rock. I can understand, in some academic way, how the two are bound—the bowl pulled from the earth, its form rendered and shaped, the rock left to its own slow becoming. But what draws me in, what keeps my attention, are the decisions made by heart and hand: the curve of a rim, the weight in the palm, the mark of the maker. I struggle with why I don’t see the rock with the same reverence. I want to. How do I learn to?

Looking ahead, as design continues its seemingly endless iterations, maybe the point isn’t to elevate the rock or the bowl, but to understand the space between them. To retrain our gazes to better accommodate their entanglement. They are not separate things but part of a larger, living system. One does not exist without the other’s quiet push and pull. What does each require of the other? What forces them into conversation? What is at stake if we separate them, pretend they don’t depend on each other? These are the questions that matter. Not because they provide easy answers, but because recognizing that interdependence—that everything, including us, is held in relation—might be the only way forward.

Carson Chan

Curator

This is a good moment for design media to remember that it is itself a design tool. What is communicated, prioritized, called out, or just given space in a gallery or on the page shapes the communities formed around that media. These communities then act in the world, changed by what they were exposed to, encountered, and engaged with. It’s hard to exaggerate the impact of, say, MoMA’s 1932 Modern Architecture exhibition, which introduced and defined the International Style. Homes, neighborhoods, and entire cities were influenced by the sleek functionalism celebrated in the show. The press, amplifying the exhibition, propelled its message across the globe. Today, at a time of territorial strife, the abatement of rights and liberties in the U.S.—all amid a self-imposed climate polycrisis—the task of shaping an audience, of designing the contours of a community in formation, is all the more urgent.

Charmaine Chan

Editor/Writer

The more I learn about metabolism, the more I understand why Japan’s response to modernism continues to capture our imagination more than half a century after that movement began. Nakagin Capsule Tower, by Kisho Kurokawa, was my initial spark.

Like many other people, I find myself increasingly drawn to modular systems in not only buildings but also interiors.

But while the interchangeability of modular designs offers numerous advantages—cost being just one—customization will always hold a special appeal.

So why not combine both and provide prefabricated, tailored solutions?

This idea isn’t new, but I would welcome greater opportunities for build-on-demand interiors, employing AI to assess the structural integrity and ecofriendliness of designs. By creating enduring modules of, for example, bathrooms (inspired by Japan’s unit baths) or furniture, customers would have the flexibility to make changes that reflect their personal style when the time comes. As I often say, the Japanese notion of “impermanent permanence” is irresistible.

Aric Chen

Director/Curator

Everyone loves a good image; that’s why we’re oversaturated with them. But beautiful images are destroying us. They seduce, or compel, us to produce more and more at the expense of the planet for something as ephemeral as a good shot. We know how to make good-looking spaces. Let’s instead focus on how to make regenerative, sustainable, meaningful spaces that become beautiful by virtue of how they are made (and unmade) and not the other way around. Perhaps this requires a new aesthetics—an aesthetics of how—that the media is well-placed to show us.

Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher

Curator/Writer

Big changes feel inevitable in the coming ten years. Rapid developments—at a speed never experienced—in technology, climate, and politics—have shifted how we live, work, and create. The cubicle, the soapbox, the lawn, the drinking hole, the reading room are spaces of the past as information can be retrieved, produced and shared anywhere, and cigarettes and alcohol are deemed as detrimental to one’s well-being as a front lawn is to nature. And yet, humans need spaces to gather, to explore, to think, and to feel. Interiority—spaces from which one rebuilds—will be prioritized in the near future. The courtyard and the conversation pit will return; the personal studio, the hookah table, and the server room will emerge, and new conversations, materials, textures and tastes will flourish. Experimentation, personal touches, and distinction will be prized. There will be time to get to know a designer and build something together that is special, healthy, and unique; emboldened, designers will gather momentum and enlarge their scope and reach until cities are living, breathing entities that reflect the individuality of their inhabitants. In this new era, urban spaces will not only accommodate but also inspire, advancing creativity and sustainability.

Jarrett Fuller

Designer/Writer/Artist

In many ways, the history of design can be read as a history of separation from—or domination over?—the natural world. In many ways, the role of design has been to redesign the world in our image, which is to say: to make the world more comfortable for humans. Everything from the development of ergonomics to the invention of HVAC has remade the spaces we inhabit harmonious with our desires, wants, and needs. What would design look like that does not separate us from nature but rather reconnects us with it?

A shift is needed in where our priorities lie, from human-centered design to ecology-centered design. This is not to demote or ignore human comfort but to acknowledge that every designed space is part of a complex ecology of living things, all of which should be considered in the design process. In the face of the climate crisis—in which architecture and design is implicated—what are new ways we can talk about and evaluate the spaces we inhabit? When I think of the design writing I’m most interested in today, it’s writing that does that: writing that seeks to reconnect our spaces to the natural world.

Elizabeth Goodspeed

Designer/Art Director/Writer

Design media tends to reward what looks good on paper: clean lines, big windows, natural light falling on an Eames chair. Because the industry’s revenue depends on keeping advertisers and brand partners happy, stories get shaped around an image; anything that doesn’t serve the fantasy gets cropped out.

What we don’t hear as much about are the people who actually make these spaces happen. Not just the designer, but the render artist, the tile installer, the assistant chasing down vendors, or the person wiring the fixtures at 7 a.m. Even when clients are quoted, it’s usually through PR-approved soundbites—not real reflections on what didn’t work, how they approached budgets, or the way the space feels months later.

If design media wants to stay relevant, it needs to broaden its lens and look beyond the surface. That means interrogating how stories get commissioned, who they’re designed to please, and what narratives keep getting repeated. It means following the full arc of a project and spotlighting work that’s functional, communal, or culturally specific—even if it’s not immediately photogenic. After all, the best spaces are the ones that feel lived in!

Joseph Grima

Architect/Critic

Sitting in Milan, a few days away from Milan Design Week, makes you feel you’re a little too close to the center of an intense reality distortion field to be able to say anything useful, or even meaningful, about design. It’s an interesting question: Is design (and interior design in particular) even capable of being useful or meaningful today? For that matter, has it ever been? Or have we, as adherents to the construct that is the “design world,” been kidding ourselves with increasing intensity over the past century or so? The question is genuinely interesting, and I’m not sure I have an answer.

Ettore Sottsass, perhaps the greatest design soothsayer of all time, once wrote a phrase that struck me: “I continue not to know how to live, but I do more or less live, and I have to carry on, maybe unhappily, designing my life.” I always found this idea interesting—that the most primal act of design is to live and that by simply living one is designing the future. This is what I believe we urgently need from design—awareness that through all these small, apparently insignificant acts of design we accumulate, we are, like it or not constructing the future. Or, rather, a future—there’s still time to decide whether it’s the one we actually desire.

Kelsey Keith

Creative Director

George Nelson famously said that design is a response to social change. There are many ways to interpret—and misinterpret—that maxim, but it’s indisputable that the world we design through cities, buildings, interiors, and objects either mirrors or rejects the prevalent culture. I would identify our present, collective need as one that responds to tech dominance, a phenomenon most of us are familiar with, from phone addiction to AI fears to screens, everywhere you look. What we, the people, need from design today is experiential, tactile, and better in person than viewed in a grid of rearranging pixels.

One example of the desire for experiential design is the exploding interest in sauna-building. Mark my words, everyone you know either wants access to a sauna, has built one, or is researching how to do it. Saunas, to me, connect two prevalent cultural moods: this desire to get offline and to live in the world with a rising awareness around health and well-being.

Building a structure isn’t the only move toward the experiential. The notion takes shape through a burgeoning consumer interest in natural, renewable materials over synthetics, valuing fabrics that translate best through touch. I see it in a small but growing coverage area in design media that highlights collecting antiques, vintage, and secondhand—objects with patina—over traditional retail shopping. The feeling is also in the ether (and, contrarily, in our digital landscape) vis-à-vis interior photography that captures mess, weird angles, and lamp cords.

David Michon

Writer/Producer/Editor

The future of vision—we hate to say—is algorithmic, atmospheric, and probably leading you to a ShopMy. Every design columnist position seems to be filled by those who succeed mainly at “aspirational” and product, not context. Substack is full of ghostwriters. Gonzo decor critique (fun, snarky, fast) is precious now and will be more precious yet.

Dung Ngo

Editor/Writer

Haute interiors are the new haute cuisine. I would like to know where the ingredients come from, not just brand names of the furnishings and building materials. Like food source transparency, I would like an open and honest disclosure of information about interior products’ origins, production methods, and environmental impacts. Let’s move beyond the LEED matrix to a new level of accountability.

Sami Reiss

Writer

Design media, or the informal part of it to which I contribute, needs, I would say, more of everything. More coverage, more breadth, more depth, more insight, more enthusiasm—and, yes, more critique. Every novel approach to talking about design should be out there, even if some of them might seem to have less of a hook.

We’re on the cusp of a new age in which fashion people and young folks are switching over and becoming fiends for design. What’s fascinating about this moment is that these folks, who might subscribe to the suite of new design newsletters, as well as my own, often have developed tastes and nuanced opinions regarding other creative fields. It’s just that, for them, architecture and design are new. And while it’s too early to predict future coverage, there are things design writers and editors can do now to catch these readers up to, say, subscribers of The Architect’s Newspaper. Why not get these readers truly conversant in current design and in vintage so that they can choose a lamp or flatware as effortlessly as they rifle through Ssense? Or more mass-facing service stories about logistics and manufacturing and scale, which demystify the buying process for consumers? To be sure, these are broad ideas, but we’re living in a very broad time. It’s not uncommon, outside the design world, to hear van der Rohe confused for Eames. It won’t last much longer, but the education has to be rolled out at scale.

Dori Tunstall

Design Anthropologist

What might be the look and feel of a new globally sustainable and culturally just standard of a good life? North America has television shows on HGTV popularizing their middle to upper class versions of a good life. According to Earth Overshoot Day, we know that this life is not sustainable for everyone on the planet, as it requires 5.1 Earths. Finland, which the design media promotes as the standard bearer of sustainable living, requires 4.1 Earths for everyone to live that standard. It is countries such as Laos, Grenada, Ghana, and Costa Rica that are globally sustainable, taking only 1.0 to 1.5 of their own countries to maintain and 1.0 to 1.5 total numbers of Earths for the whole world to live that standard.

Given the rate at which we are overconsuming Earth as we aspire to unsustainable lifestyles, I want a future in which we glamorize the interior design and architecture of the middle-class homes in these countries as the new global standard of a good life and as models of cultural justice. In this future, we would recognize and reward designers for demonstrating the desirability of the look and feel of these new standards, which through materials, methods, and attention to local culture, would be attainable by all.