If you work in commercial design, you know the drill. Every June, the industry descends on Chicago for what is essentially our Super Bowl: NeoCon and Fulton Market Days, two flagship events that form Chicago Design Week. More than 50,000 designers, real estate professionals, facilities teams, specifiers, and end users go to see the launch of the newest products and innovations over three jam-packed days.
Now, I’ve been attending NeoCon at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago since 2012. Over the years, I’ve seen thousands of new products launched and some truly powerful innovations. I’m talking about a sensory immersive table from Haworth born out of a need to make meetings more engaging; acoustic systems from Snowsound that immediately reduce all noise from a room when audible privacy is a concern; and reclaimable flooring, which creates a truly circular product to reduce waste.
At the most recent Chicago Design Week, I was juggling a completely full slate. I had client meetings to attend, strategy discussions with executives to facilitate, a panel on the future of inclusion to moderate, and an event to host for FTSG. But even with only a few spare moments, I knew exactly how I’d spend them: exploring the latest innovations. I was eager to see what the newest products might signal about the spaces being designed, and the evolving needs of the people who will use them.
But that’s not what I saw.
Instead of signs of where the industry is heading, this year I saw a repetitive echo chamber focused on trending color stories and matching the competition. The most future-facing move I saw this year came from DIRTT with their new demountable, one-hour-rated partition, which has the power to transform multifamily, life science, and health care projects worldwide. Everything else felt a little “been there, done that.”
Some of this lack of innovation is because the market has made a full pivot away from the workplace. After years of being the steadiest sector, workplace has hit rock bottom in terms of project potential. Many companies have turned their attention to other sectors, changing the product road map. And with supply chain issues and unpredictable costs still looming, many are opting for smaller, safer rollouts.
That shift in focus is understandable, but it also reveals a deeper disconnect. Chicago Design Week is meant to be a window into what’s next. Instead, it felt like everyone was simply responding to the world we live in now, rather than preparing for the world we’re heading into.
We are seeing AI upending the entire design process and industry as a whole. Clients are requesting new types of spaces that foster resilience and community connection. Sustainability and deconstruction plans are table stakes. We have materials that can self-heal and surfaces that clean themselves. So, if that is the world we are already in — and, arguably, the future we are heading toward — where were the launches that reflect that reality? Where were the self-expanding, automatically healing, reconfigurable systems and products?
Now, some of you may be thinking, “We will get there; we have other things to focus on.” But that mindset is precisely what creates the innovation gap we saw on full display this year. When leaders and companies focus solely on the near-term goal of chasing sales targets or matching competitors, they lose sight of the long view. And to be clear, it’s not because they lack talent or imagination. I’ve worked with brilliant leaders running billion-dollar portfolios, but even the best teams and leaders can get stuck when they start looking sideways instead of forward.
When that happens, companies react to one issue at a time and never step back to see the bigger pattern. They patch problems instead of building future solutions, which is how the gap continues to grow. The good news is leaders can take some easy strategic steps to try to close the gap:
- Define where you want the industry to go. Use a broader lens to envision what you want the future to look like, to create a true innovation road map that will propel the market forward, not just catch up with it.
- Stop focusing on feature updates to drive development. Pay attention to the pressures and patterns that shape how we live and work, and drive the innovation needed.
- Build an innovation system, not just a pipeline. That means creating structures that allow for fast testing, future scanning, and bold ideas. Make it top-down, bottom-up, and from the outside in.
Chicago Design Week should be where we glimpse the future. Next year, I hope we will have stopped designing to catch up to 2026 and have started shaping the path to 2036. I want to see innovations that reveal how we will interact with and utilize AI, new space typologies that actively restore resilience and are regenerative, and products and solutions that truly provide flexibility in a new way. Even small steps in that direction would be a powerful signal for what the future can bring.
