I felt like design—as the final dialogue and the core focus of the organization sponsoring the dialogues—should have been the capstone of the whole event. However, the dialogue was scattered, focusing primarily on whether or not beauty exists, and whether permanence or impermanence should be a focus of designers’ work. The coming disruptions in industrial design, architecture, and planning and how they would affect our lives were to be discussed, but this question was never even recognized, much less addressed.

As the question was kicked around, I’m going to weigh-in: in my opinion, beauty exists. Personally, my definition of beauty has to do with not only what a thing looks like, but what it does, and how it does it. This applies to people as well. I have known numerous people who were favored with good physical aesthetics but were base, ugly people in how they conducted their lives; I would never associate the term “beauty” with them. The same is true of designed objects. Whether or not “smarter” or “better” designers are concerned with this is irrelevant to me; it exists and matters to me. It is one of my primary considerations as a designer.

On impermanence and permanence, I think it’s a less useful question than this: does the object participate in all ways within a larger scheme or system. It was briefly mentioned that nature is closed-loop; it re-absorbs and re-tasks elements. Human beings have very few things that qualify as “permanent.” In fact, I don’t know that there’s much in the world that can truly be classified as such. It’s more a matter of comparative lifespans. The more useful question is is the object in question a component within a closed-loop lifecycle. Otherwise, the question of permanence vs. impermanence is really just an ego trip, which designers should really get off of.