Artificial intelligence raises the question of whether we have understood the design disciplines correctly until now. While AI handles the legwork with ease, we must rediscover and lay bare the human core of our work.
“Read” describes the ability to read a situation: to attentively comprehend place, material, light and context, and to find threads to pick up. “Respond” means answering what has been read with careful design and imagination: not overwriting the existing entirely, but building on it, honouring its traces, continuing or reconfiguring them.
To design in a situated way means working in context, inspecting the real space, and finding colours there. This design becomes relational when it builds relationships between people, space, object, material and colour. It succeeds when finding processes are shaped cooperatively, decisions are made jointly, and different needs are recognised. Deliberate design knows its responsibility for the functioning of a design. A design is good when it is resonant. When it brings into being a constellation between object, place and person that creates something greater than the elements on their own.
Colour is therefore not understood here as decoration but as infrastructure: it orders, orientates, includes, and makes function tangible. When we choose a colour for a coworking space, we are not decorating; we are supporting collaboration. When we specify a tone for a care facility, we are not following a short-lived trend; we are anticipating demographic change. Cultural tendencies are not abstract forces to us but lived realities.