20 years of design

The past twenty years have seen such rapid and dramatic changes in design trends and technology that it can bei hard to tell where we are headed. Denna Jones looks for a path through the recent past that might lead to the future

If the past two decades of design are framed as a sport analogy, then consider we’ve been bowled a series of googlies (for Americans, think curveballs). What we expected isn’t always what we got. We were caught napping by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Social media spun off from purely social into algorithms, influencers and fatigue. The letter X as a signifier for the Nirvana generation and Twitter’s replacement became shorthand for product collaborations-brand X brand, brand X influencer, and so on. Rug collabs became hot because rug production is ‘simple’ compared with products that have complicated tooling and supply chains. Clicks-and-bricks are strategically supplanting D2C (digital direct-to-consumer) and IRL bricks-and-mortar (see COVER 75). Dupes (duplicates) grew the audience for design, but at creative and financial cost to designers like Jan Kath, whose groundbreaking 2013 Erased Heritage rug collection was endlessly copied. The evil twin of dupesfast fashion-floods the world with incessant drops of unsustainable clothing and home products.

But this recap is not all googlies. There are sixes in the mix, such as the trend for curves in interior design. Modular sofas came of age in the 1970s, but only recently have curved modular sofas-Massimo Castagna’s 2022 Cloud Infinity for Gallotti & Radice for example-begun to float as sculptural features. Their popularity is due in part to customisable curve configurations.

Curved furniture created a desire for rugs that complement the shapes, contributing to a predicted 37% in value globally by 2030 for the sector. Influential in breaking the tyranny of quadrilateral rugs has been cc-tapis. Its collections of rugs with curves inspired other rug-makers to do the same. The brand’s newest collaboration with Patricia Urquiola is a double-sided tufted carpet where curves and circles dominate.

Clicks-and-bricks is another powerful six. Beni Rugs’ slow phygital strategy (online plus a showroom in New York and one in Morocco) contrasts with venture capital-funded interior brands forced to retreat to digital-only (or close completely) owing to unreasonable growth and profit expectations.

Beni Rugs launched as D2C in 2018 and shifted to clicks-and-bricks in 2021. Its studio-showroom near Marrakech upgrades the ‘five Ps’ of marketing-product, price, place, promotion, people for the 21st century. At this immersive, experiential indoor-outdoor travel destination, clients can enjoy boules, stroll the garden, refuel in the café, and watch Berber women weave rugs.

Product customisation was popularised by Nike in Y2K, and it is now a customer expectation for everything from burgers to Bentleys. Beni Rugs encourages clients to ‘choose your colourcombination, size and tassel preference. We’ll take care of the rest.’ Dupes are unbranded copies: the 2.0 version of logobranded counterfeit designer handbags sold on New York City’s infamous Canal Street. The global reach of Chinese ‘replica’ websites and the popularity of ‘haul’ and ‘unboxing’ videos mean the volume of dupes has exploded since TikTok’s 2016 launch.

Dupe culture is enabled by e-commerce and reverse image searches powered by image recognition technology. @theeverygirl (1.2 million Instagram followers) uses Google’s lens app to source cheap dupe décor, while dupe.com, launched in 2024, goes a step further. ‘Think of a dupe as the cheat code for grown-up decorating,’ says its website. ‘You get the vibe of that $3,000 “it” sofa without the wallet hangover.”

Dupe culture prefers curation to originality. Dupe demand is also a reaction to ‘overpriced’ products, a line of reasoning that can seem justified when luxury companies like Loro Piana (owned by LVMH) are reprimanded over sourced labour practices while their products sell for greedy multiples of production costs. It seems impossible to defeat dupe culture, but designer Tom Dixon has one solution. He endured two decades of worldwide dupes of his Beat light before he duped it himself in 2024 and released it as the cheaper Unbeaten. Most of these examples are part of a Y2K continuum. Some even pre-date the 21st century. But Al is the bouncer that whacked us on the helmet. Its rate of change and growth since 2022 is like the evolutionary speed of viruses. Al and its current version for image content creation-Generative Al (see COVER 79)-has profound and perhaps unimaginable implications for creativity.

Al’s databases are created from billions of images and words ‘scraped’ from the internet. Al remixes copyrighted designs, images and ideas, which means when a user types a prompt, Al answers with a hybrid dupe. Several rug companies have released collections designed with their own proprietary Al, while designers are testing Al as an ideas generator and a tool to turn sketches into 3D realisations.

If there is a single overriding lesson from the past twenty years, it’s that human creativity is fast becoming a form of luxury goods. If this is so, then the next twenty years will be a new frontier: an opportunity for creatives to make their skills, ideas and products irreplaceable by AI. When creatives become irreplaceable, the opportunity to charge luxury prices can expand from the current niche number of creatives to a larger cohort. It’s time for humans to step up and hit for six. Or, as Americans say, swing for the fences.