The Futures We Build

The Magic We’ve Lost 

As one of our special guests, Marie Stafford (Global Director at VML) powerfully reminded us: “We are living in an age of disenchantment.” Whether interpreted as connection, joy, novelty, spontaneity, or simply a space to just ‘be’, magic is missing from our built environment.

This absence stems from fundamental human needs not being met in our everyday environments. We crave emotional connections and visceral experiences, yet although digitally connected, we’re emotionally isolated. With constant stimulation, we have no space to pause or simply be bored – yet this is where magic happens. Meanwhile, distraction and busyness are rewarded while we’ve forgotten how to truly engage with the now, losing our capacity for presence and wonder.

Creating Magic: Four Key Principles 

Design as catalyst for human connection: Thoughtful design can ignite imagination and wonder, serving as a powerful “play starter” that brings people together. As Filippo Cuttica, Interaction Design Director at LEGO emphasised during the roundtable, architecture should spark creativity and unexpected encounters.

Prioritise experience and agency: Create spaces that give people freedom to carve their own desire paths while ensuring everyone feels safe and included. We can’t experience magic if we don’t feel welcome. We must design for everyone, especially marginalised communities. Fundamentally, places can’t deliver magic if they don’t deliver safety first; we must get the basics right before pursuing wonder.

Don’t lose sight of horizons: Both literally and figuratively, horizons inspire big thinking. If decision-makers spend their days in dull workspaces with limited views, how can we expect transformative ideas? Create spaces that invite pause, wonder, and connection.

Invest in understanding: We need better research into how spaces affect emotional well-being. How do we measure belonging, serendipitous encounters, or the frequency of genuine pause? What metrics capture whether a space sparks creativity or fosters the kind of boredom that leads to breakthrough thinking?

Communities Beyond Buzzwords

The word “community” has lost its meaning. In our second roundtable, featuring insights from Sarah Douglas, Director at The Liminal Space, and Chance Marshall, former Co-Founder of Self Space, we confronted this reality. Are we talking about a group, a place, or a feeling? In an era of increasing social fragmentation, community plays a foundational role in shaping individual identity and fostering social cohesion. The stakes couldn’t be higher as we grapple with how communities are formed, what sustains them, and the pressing need for spaces that let them prosper.

What we must reflect on 

Our conversations revealed fundamental shifts needed in how we approach community-centred design. We must recognise that design is a conversation, and when we’re too active in designing, we can’t listen to the communities we’re meant to serve. This requires us to challenge what’s deemed operationally impossible, while acknowledging that these topics are complex, but we often make them unnecessarily complicated.

What we need more of 

Our built environment desperately needs places to slow down, rest, and just be – spaces that allow for genuine pause and reflection in our hyperconnected world. We must prioritise environments that enable quality conversations, creating settings specifically designed for meaningful exchange rather than mere transaction. This includes promoting walking as an act of resistance, reclaiming movement and connection to place. Equally important is developing a ‘producer responsibility’ that extends caring beyond project completion, ensuring spaces remain vibrant and responsive to community needs. Finally, we must commit to consulting young designers in the process, bringing fresh perspectives and lived experience to planning that often overlooks emerging voices.

What we need less of 

We should actively reduce practices that undermine authentic community building. This stopping the offsetting of social purpose through tokenistic gestures that don’t address root issues and, perhaps most critically, we need to stop caring only until the project finishes, recognising that operations is as important as design in creating lasting value.

Resilience as Evolution, Not Restoration

Our final roundtable, featuring Starling Strategy’s Annie Auerbach and Adam Chmielowski, alongside School of International Futures’ Director Andrew Curry, challenged our fundamental understanding of resilience. The current paradigm of “bouncing back” is insufficient: we need to let go of dysfunctional structures to imagine alternative futures.

Three Critical Shifts Reshaping Our Social Landscape:

• The Disappearance of Shared Social Worlds
  Modern life has systematically eroded third spaces where spontaneous interactions once thrived. We’re losing the social grit that comes from weak social ties: the everyday interactions that build our relationship muscles. Young people are particularly affected, experiencing a friendship recession as they socialise less in person while identity-building becomes performative and asynchronous through social media.
•  The Retreat into Digital Isolation
  A cultural shift toward pro-solitude has turned homes into sanctuaries, prioritising self-care over communal life at the very moment we need connection most. Digital segregation compounds this, creating echo chambers that fragment our shared understanding of reality.
• Cultural and Political Polarisation
  As men’s and women’s life trajectories diverge, we see rising resentment and zero-sum thinking. Partisan narratives frame social progress as loss for others, creating divisive frameworks that we must challenge to imagine more tolerant, inclusive approaches to collective life.

Bringing It Together: Design for Human Flourishing 

Across all three conversations, a clear pattern emerged: we’ve designed away the conditions that make us human. Magic, community, and resilience aren’t separate challenges: they’re interconnected aspects of what makes spaces truly human-centred. The opportunity is transformative: spaces have the power to either fragment or unite, to constrain or inspire, to isolate or connect. The choice is ours.