Editor's Letter – August 2023

There’s a certain contradiction in the calmness. It’s high summer (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least) and while the design industry enjoys a spot of downtime with out-of-office messages the norm and fair halls empty but expectant, the mind is working overtime. A time for recharging, the summer break for me is also a surprisingly intense period of reflection, reassessment and regrouping, on both a professional and a personal level. It’s a time when priorities once again crystallise. What’s really important? What truly matters?

Against the backdrop of the hottest summer on record globally, the terrifying images of devastating forest fires in the likes of Hawaii and Greece, attended by catastrophic flooding in other regions of the world, leave us all in no doubt of what our chief priority is. Climate change, caused by global warming, is here and now. We know what the stakes are.

And yet changing behaviours is not easy. The aviation industry, for example, is booming as new records are set in terms of summer-vacation travel (consumer demand seemingly trumping higher ticket prices), while a number of national governments are backsliding on their commitment to carbon reduction, arguing that the issuing of new oil- and gas-drilling licences is necessary to manage the transition to a carbon-neutral future. 

A recent feature authored by my colleague James Wormald offers an excellent counterpoint here. His highly informative survey of the many solutions already available to reduce, and even eliminate, our dependence on gas in the home features both inspiring examples of non-fossil-fuelled housing projects and the latest, tech-harnessing kitchen appliances. Definitely worth a read.

In Copenhagen during 3daysofdesign, meanwhile, I was joined on stage by Kim Herforth Nielsen of 3XN for a fascinating conversation on the practice and the potential of mass-timber architecture, and its displacement of concrete (with all the embodied carbon that the latter comes with). With projects in the pipeline that will top-out at over 200 m, the sky for Nielsen is the limit – if you’ll excuse the pun. ‘There’s no other resource you can grow and grow and grow,’ the Danish architectural pioneer was keen to emphasise. 

For him, there’s a natural desire on the part of all of us to live and work in sustainable structures made of wood. Societal acceptance is not an issue. ‘Who doesn’t want to be in a timber building?’ The real spanner in the works are the insurance companies, who still view timber architecture as high-risk. You can watch our discussion here, along with my conversations with Norm Architects, Space Copenhagen and one-of-a-kind product designer Christian Troels. 

Sustainability is one of the main drivers of our DAAily Wallet project here at DAAily platforms – our latest digital innovation to support design manufacturers in their efforts to capture and communicate the eco-credentials of their products, as well as to move towards a circular economy. We’re currently working with a number of industry first-movers to create dynamic, NFT-based product certificates that will store all the relevant sustainability info pertaining to their designs, while also functioning as all-important proofs of authenticity. 

One of our collaborators, high-end Swiss rug producer Ruckstuhl, is even using our solution to explore decentralised manufacturing; first you buy the digital twin and then you choose where, locally to you, you want to have the product made.

There’s more on the innovation front, however. A lot more. This autumn, we launch DAAily Insights, our new digital toolkit for Architonic members that will enable them to get ahead and stay ahead in their business. Indispensable insights into their brand performance – in the form of traffic, engagement, campaign and product analytics – will come with personalised, data-based and, above all, actionable suggestions on how to improve. Our members will also be able to leverage the latest market trends to sharpen their strategic decisions.

An integral part of our DAAily Insights service will be the game-changing DAAily Index – a powerful, data-powered benchmark that, with its scoring service rooted in 220 million industry data points from over 15,000 manufacturers, will allow companies to see exactly where they stand in relation to their direct competitors and let them make the right decisions to improve their online presence and gain business advantage. 

The summer may be quiet, but don’t be fooled.

Best wishes from Architonic HQ and stay well.

Simon Keane-Cowell
Editor-in-Chief

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