The Seven Design Trends Worth Watching From the Past Year | 2017 Annual Report

Design is no longer just a vessel for art or culture. It is slowly becoming a medium that carries more varied messages and takes on more difficult questions.

Standing at the end of the year and looking back, what left the deepest mark on you from the world of design?

In past years, we have closed out December with QDaily's annual design roundup, taking stock of the most influential work — or the cleverest solutions — to come out of each design discipline over the preceding twelve months: architecture, graphic design, branding and packaging, interior design.

Going back over QDaily's design coverage from this year, we noticed two things that stand out. First, the world's tastes are converging, above all in commercial work: social networks like Instagram have let trends seep into every corner. Second, design is trying harder and harder to answer social questions — how to cope with a changing city, how to serve the needs of minority communities, how to bring people together in an age of thinning contact.

Good design resists a single definition. Take architecture alone. Skyscrapers kept shooting up across the world this year, and buildings are more than ever the product of power and capital. Yet some people still hope to shape society through architecture — among them David Adjaye, the British-Ghanaian architect and the only designer on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people this year, who put it this way: "I want to be more engaged in the world."

We have sorted out seven kinds of trends. We hope they give you something to think about.

1. Renovating Old Buildings Is Catching On

In the West, the renovation and reuse of old buildings has long been a hot topic among architects.

In 1979, Australia drew up the Burra Charter for the conservation of places of cultural significance. To protect built heritage, it spelled out the idea of "adaptive reuse" — adjusting a place so it can take on a new function. The approach is encouraged precisely because it does not really weaken a place's cultural significance.

On one side, urban renewal is a question that never goes away: a city, a neighborhood, a single building — each is built and rebuilt over decades or centuries.

On the other, cities are growing more crowded, land for new construction is running short, and the chances to reuse old buildings rise accordingly. And there is more to it: an old house, weathered and even half-ruined, set against new materials and a contemporary architectural language, tends to yield something of real value — a cultural resonance and the feel of an art collection.

Today more and more clients and architects lean toward reuse projects.

The key to reuse, of course, is finding the right new use for a historic building. As we often show, large derelict structures — factories, warehouses — are turned into commercial spaces: restaurants, cafés, showrooms, mixed-use complexes. There are plenty of residential cases too. Old courtyard houses in Beijing's hutongs and lane houses in Shanghai's longtangs — poorly built, badly lit, their services aged and ill-suited to the times — have all become the kind of case designers relish.

Projects like these gathered steam over the year.

Take the specialty coffee brand Blue Bottle, which we have written about more than once. Both of the locations it opened this year — in San Francisco and in Tokyo — went into old buildings. Founder James Freeman holds nearly impossible standards for every café he opens. Whether it is an abandoned factory, a seaside warehouse, or the shell of an old theater, he insists on fusing the architecture with local culture.

The San Francisco store sits in a 1920s red-brick-and-timber historic building downtown, once a plumbing warehouse for the bath-fixture brand Kohler. Blue Bottle's seventh Japanese location is an old Tokyo house, formerly the Ito Clinic, which ran for 52 years and doubled as a home.

Starbucks had its eye on a Japanese heritage building too. The store billed as "the world's first Starbucks with tatami" opened this summer in Kyoto, in a century-old traditional house on Ninenzaka. The Taisho-era structure has been kept intact; the iconic mermaid sign at the entrance is gone, replaced by a traditional Japanese noren curtain.

Boutique-hotel owners are fans of the old-building trend as well. As we have noted, many boutique hotels that opened in the past couple of years were converted from motels built in the 1960s and 1970s.

Some take a more unusual path. A coal-loading crane in the harbor of Nordhavn, Copenhagen, has been turned into The Krane, a luxury hotel with meeting rooms and a spa. Its preserved black steel-frame exterior still lets you glimpse the past.

New York's Life Hotel answers its historic building far more literally. After developer David Mitchell bought the 19th-century building — known as the first home of the renowned photojournalism magazine LIFE — he simply named the new hotel Life, meaning to reassert the spirit of the 1920s.

Shanghai's "Columbia Circle," first developed in the 1920s, is now the Xinhua Road Historic Conservation Area, and the script of heritage renovation is playing out there too — from a Spanish Colonial Revival villa on Lane 231 that gained an extended loft, to a Baroque building leased by Vanke and reworked by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) into a new creative-industry park.

2. A Boom in Building and Expanding Museums and Galleries

A report by the Global Cultural Districts Network — the Cultural Infrastructure Index — found that in 2016 alone the world spent US$8.45 billion completing 101 cultural facilities, while 34 countries announced plans to spend a further US$8.54 billion on 136 more.

As we noted in "Last Year the World Spent About $8.5 Billion on Arts Facilities, and Europe Still Leads | QDaily Data", this wave of museum and gallery building does not simply mean that more people care about art and culture. Other forces are at work — the push of globalization, building agendas at the national level — and there is also what Winnie Wong, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has observed: "The vast majority of museums, public or private, share one trait: they all provide political cover for the enormous real-estate projects behind them."

Whatever the developers intend, a museum faces a hard test of survival the moment it opens. Running a museum well, so that it truly does what it is meant to do, is where the focus has to lie from here on.

There is no once-and-for-all formula for running a museum. A look at what the old, illustrious institutions did this year makes that plain.

The scale and depth of the British Museum's collection need no introduction. This summer, with more than a third of its holdings unable to go on display for lack of gallery space, the museum launched a ten-year renovation and expansion — so that its collection can tell "a more coherent and engaging story."

Tate Modern's newly finished wing, the work of Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, was seen as one of the year's most anticipated museum openings. Beside the original building — itself raised on the site of a disused power station — the new wing does not jar. It seems to say that the East London neighborhood Tate had charged with energy still has more magic to work.

Like the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York also announced this summer a US$400 million expansion plan, pledging to "present work in richer ways, with more art by artists of other ethnicities and by women." The point of this rebuild is not to give the building a grander shell, but to make MoMA a museum more attuned to its time.

"Diversity" also marked the world's new and expanded museums this year. The categories grow more specialized, the themes more varied. These differentiated, theme-driven museums are opening new doors through which people can come to understand a city or a history — and whether they offer experience, access, or simply variety, that is no bad thing.

Whether you are after new knowledge or a long look at old history, the depth and breadth a themed museum can bring to a single subject is something a large general museum can rarely match.

Take the Postal Museum in London, which spans five centuries of British postal history. It can take you deep into the story of how the postal system — once as central to daily life as the internet — was invented and refined in Britain, and went on to change the world.

If you love escape rooms, a spy museum in New York lets you carry out a spy's missions for real, with seven themed exhibitions on surveillance, hacking, deception, and more.

The newly reopened Tokyo Advertising Museum is well worth a look too. Its collection runs to roughly 300,000 items from the Edo period to the present, plus 28,000 books on advertising and marketing — a fascinating lens on how modern Japanese society has changed.

3. Urban Public Space Grows More Varied

Architects are paying more and more attention to urban public space — not the big civic projects like stadiums, train stations, or libraries, but the open spaces that make a city come alive: the places that ask where people go, where people meet, and how to make those encounters pleasant.

Cities are in fact full of idle plots that can be built into and reworked to serve the daily needs of residents. When a designer steps in, they are helping a listless or abandoned space adjust and evolve, breathing new life into it.

Today, when people argue over which city best embodies the ideal of livability, they like to weigh how rich and how accessible its public spaces are.

Helle Søholt, founding partner of Jan Gehl Architects, once described what makes a good public space: it should sit well with its surroundings, be easy to enter, and have the capacity to gather people into a community. Spaces that are abandoned, restricted, or cut off from their surroundings are bad ones — people feel unsafe in them, and women, children, and the elderly will never think to go there.

This year we covered many thoughtful transformations of urban public space. One trend is clear: designers are increasingly reshaping public space from the angle of real human experience, while loading several functions into it at once.

Most parking structures are about nothing but cars. Danish firm JAJA Architects broke that single-purpose mold, turning Park'n'Play — a parking structure in the harbor of Nordhavn, Copenhagen — into a green landmark that doubles as a playground.

The same instinct runs through the new Baltic Station Market in Tallinn, Estonia. Under a sweeping sawtooth roof, three levels are laid out in order; food shops, snack stalls, florists, secondhand dealers, craft stalls, and beer bars are scattered throughout — and the market has even become a force in reviving the local small-business economy.

Then there are public spaces bound up with natural landscape, already fine places to relax — yet through different kinds of intervention, designers can give people layers of pleasure that go beyond simply being near nature.

The "Treetop Experience" trail at Camp Adventure park in Denmark is one such case: EFFEKT Architects set a 45-meter spiral observation tower and a 600-meter treetop walkway into the forest. Unlike scenic viewpoints that demand a hard climb, this trail asks almost nothing of your fitness, so nearly anyone can come to wander and take in the beauty of the woods.

Also in Denmark, the new Vestre Fjord Park in Aalborg is another fine blend of natural scenery and built form. On the southern shore of the Limfjord, the park follows the line of the fjord itself, set between the fjord and an open stretch of water within the park. Recreational facilities are threaded between the building modules, and plants cover the roofs and slopes. Everyone can find their own way to pass the time.

Technology has a part to play too: a climate-controlled garden in Milan uses climate-control technology to let visitors feel all four seasons at once, at any point in the year.

4. The Nostalgia for the 1960s Returns

Retro is part of almost every wave of trends. Its appeal may come from the fact that the fashions of each era carry the imprint of their time, along with the particular culture that shaped them.

Affection for the mid-twentieth century, and the 1960s above all, was especially strong in design over the past year. The 1960s were indeed a golden age for design: a new generation began to challenge Functionalism, building a plural design culture that gave rise to Neo-Modernism, Pop, Postmodernism, Deconstructivism, and more.

It was an era ruled by a hippie sensibility — free, psychedelic, a golden age for music, art, fashion, and culture. Everyone holds a private image of that decade: the traffic jam crawling toward Woodstock in 1969, the costumes and plots of Mad Men, or a copy of Abbey Road. That era of flux and open possibility left a precious cultural inheritance to those who came after. The current resurfaces from time to time, and this past year our coverage was no exception.

Take the newly opened boutique hotel Calistoga in California's Napa Valley, itself converted from a mid-century motel. Its colors, patterns, furniture, and lighting were all drawn from work and elements of the 1950s through the 1970s, calling back the years when motor lodges were at their peak.

The celebrated design hotel Ace, which opened its Chicago location this year, carries a strong mid-century feel, the furniture most of all. Adding fashionable yellows, pinks, greens, and blues lends the retro mood extra warmth and life.

The Western 1960s have a counterpart in 1960s Hong Kong — and if you had to name one specific scene, it would be the Goldfinch Restaurant from Wong Kar-wai's films.

Bun House, a new restaurant that opened this summer in Soho, London, drew its retro interior straight from the Goldfinch. The whole space fuses British colonial elements with traditional Chinese ones — exactly the feeling of 1960s Hong Kong, with its rich cosmopolitan appeal and its melting-pot character.

The same spirit runs through "Cross Cafe", a bing sutt — a Hong Kong-style café — that opened on Hong Kong Island this year. Since this is a brand born in the 1960s, Studio UNIT set the tone for the whole space by drawing on the bing sutt style of 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong: neon signs glowing a faint orange, handwritten menus, black-and-white mosaic floor tiles, metal-shutter walls plastered with handbills — all the classic elements are there.

The Fleming, a Hong Kong hotel that finished its renovation and reopened in October, also breathes the air of old Hong Kong. Its colors and materials evoke the industrial boom of the 1960s and 1970s, and the city's distinctive ferry culture.

5. Color Trends

This year's trending colors were brighter and richer than in years past. People want more color and are more willing to try something different. After the run of macaron pastels, the year's protagonists became colors that were either saturated and bold, or quietly soft, or shaded with grey.

Designers have grown bolder with color — perhaps because color is such a direct visual sensation, which we might read as a kind of shortcut in visual expression.

But whether you use bright accents, balance a bold, vivid palette with black and white, or work with neons, gradients, and primary colors, deploying color in a way that reads refined rather than chaotic is a discipline of its own.

Many of the cases we covered this year are worth using as references for color.

How do you use highly saturated color?

The Dutch De Stijl movement is an excellent guide. Recently the German furniture brand Loehr, founded in 2012, took it as inspiration and added new pieces to its Germany-made series: shelves, benches, a two-seat sofa, and a small dining table. Spare in structure and finished either in powder coat or in mirror polish, these pieces boldly introduce highly saturated greens, sky blues, and yellows.

The apartment of Brazilian jewelry designer Brenda Vidal is a textbook case of bold color. Each room has a signature color — pink, orange, mint green, sky blue — but the method is anything but ordinary. Rather than painting one wall a single color and matching it with floors, accessories, or curtains, the designer used many colors that either echo or contrast with the dominant hue. Within a single room, this play of harmony and tension paradoxically produces a sense of coherence.

And what about the trending colors of recent years?

Shades of blue and green, and the much-coveted "millennial pink," can easily turn into failed imitations. Here is how to get them right.

Soft pink and velvet are good partners, no question: line long wall panels with velvet in a candy shop and you have a sure trigger for girlish delight. No one will doubt your nerve with color then, because that rosy, dreamy quality is a natural fit for tempting candy and sweets.

The furniture giant IKEA and the Danish design brand ferm LIVING both released new collections this year that work in trending colors.

Soft colors are versatile and safe — but how do you keep them fresh?

In October, in our "This Design Is Something" column, we ran a feature on "Using Soft Color Palettes to Create Calm Interiors", with six cases we recommend.

Stockholm's Note Design Studio, an accomplished hand with color, this year completed Hidden Tints, the renovation of an old Stockholm house, spreading soft yellows, greens, and pinks across broad expanses of wall, decorative moldings, and door and window frames. The project sweeps away the cliché of Scandinavian minimalism. As designer Sanna Wåhlin puts it: "Color helps bring out the luxury of architecture and space at the level of detail."

6. The Fusion of Architecture and Nature

In many cases it has grown hard to tell architecture and landscape design apart. Green building and inventive cross-disciplinary work have become the main direction of urban development. As we use up the last of the buildable land, and as our way of life strains our energy supply, architects have learned to balance urban construction and green space at the same time.

People who spend long hours in air-conditioned rooms seem to drift further and further from nature.

Research from the University of Oregon suggests that bringing lively natural scenery indoors — the shimmer of sunlit water, the dappled play of light through branches — can help people stay calm and concentrate better. In fact, as early as the 1980s, Roger Ulrich, a professor noted for his work on healthcare design, argued that nature has a positive effect on wellbeing: patients in rooms with views of natural landscape recovered more efficiently.

Ideally, the relationship between a building and nature should be more active than simply "doing no harm."

Vietnamese designers have been especially inventive in drawing on nature. Architect Vo Trong Nghia, whom we have mentioned many times, has turned out a string of new work in recent years — farm kindergartens, tree houses — all built on the same basic question of how to merge as fully as possible with nature, and all, in effect, searching for answers to the problems of fast-urbanizing cities.

Among this year's examples, a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City converted from an old house poses the same question: how to come as close to nature as it can. The firm Kientruc O linked the building to its garden, giving diners an unobstructed view of greenery — and tucking quite a few tables among the plants themselves.

In another new Vo Trong Nghia project, a "Bamboo House" in a high-density part of Ho Chi Minh City again aims to rebuild the harmony between residents and nature. The bamboo house was meant to create the most comfortable living space possible within a tight footprint, with natural ventilation and natural light. Open at front and back, it is wrapped in planted bamboo that secures privacy without choking off the airflow.

Then there is a Hanoi café called "Koi" — just 88 square meters — into which Farming Architects fit a koi pond, an indoor waterfall, and a rooftop garden.

7. Wood Returns as a Building Material

In both architecture and interior design, wood — durable, useful, beautiful in grain, scent, and texture — is coming back. The creativity of designers has, to a degree, widened the range of what wood can do.

British architect Andrew Waugh, a partner at the practice Waugh Thistleton, told Dezeen last year: "This is the beginning of the age of timber."

And indeed, timber buildings seem to have found their moment, largely thanks to a set of advantages that are hard to dispute: timber absorbs surplus carbon dioxide from the air; it improves acoustic and thermal performance; and it is more sustainable than concrete or cement.

In many of the cases we covered this year, even when the building itself is not timber-framed, designers deliberately rebuilt a timber structure within the interior — wood really does give off a warmth and friendliness that other materials can't.

Take Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, a master of timber. His new space for Whitestone Gallery in Taipei uses horizontally arranged cypress planks to form a relief structure. The wood seems to grow up from inside the space, taking over the gallery's facade; the same timber carries through to the stairs, bookshelves, and reclining platforms, the angle adjusted and the spacing changed throughout, producing a range of spatial moods and a variety of activity zones.

Shanghai firm Bengo Studio built this hotel in a pine forest in the Qiyun Mountain scenic area, rising to the same height as the surrounding cedars. It is made of seven stacked modules, each a little over two meters tall, holding a foyer, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, and a viewing room. For the facade the architects used local red cedar, keeping the build as environmentally sound as possible while avoiding the risk that timber from other regions might bring pests or disease to the local ecosystem.

The planned new art museum in Tampere, Finland is another cleverly conceived timber building. Mindful of the region's well-developed timber-processing industry, the firm 3GATTI worked with what the place already has, proposing an unusual timber design.

Enormous timber-panel walls, made from glued laminated timber (glulam) or laminated veneer lumber, are shaped into different forms and set among the glass facade, filtering sunlight to create ideal lighting for the galleries. Cutouts of varying sizes form a sequence of cave-like connected voids.