Summarised Design

Written by Sarah Mulay, Director, Artist & Web Designer - Shapes Art & Design

On the quiet loss of intention in modern design, and why essentialism is not the same as minimalism.

It started as a conversation between two designers, the kind that begins with excitement and ends with a quiet, uncomfortable realisation.

We were working on a space for an architecture brand, talking about how the floor plan could mirror the geometry of the logo when seen from above. The ideas came fast. Courtyards aligned to axes. Materiality that echoed the mark. A building that wasn't just branded, but conceived as a single, unified thought. We were animated. We were building something beautiful in our heads.

And then I heard myself say it: "That's a lot of work."

The room didn't go quiet. But I did. Because in that small, reflexive sentence was something I hadn't quite confronted before, a conditioned surrender. A belief, buried just beneath the surface, that ambition on this scale is somehow indulgent. That the extraordinary is impractical. That thoroughness is the enemy of the deliverable.

"When did we begin apologising for caring too much?"

Walk through a centuries-old building, a Mughal haveli, a Gothic cathedral, a Baroque palace, and you will notice something that no rendering software can fully replicate: evidence of time spent. Every carved corbel. Every inlaid threshold. Every jali screen, cut by hand, by someone who understood that a single pattern repeated across a façade is not repetition, it is devotion.

Those craftsmen did not have CNC routers. They did not have parametric modelling or laser cut stone. They had chisels, patience, and an unquestioned belief that the work deserved everything they had. The result is spaces that still, centuries later, make people stop and look upward.

Now consider what we build today. We have the machinery. We have the tools that could produce, in a fraction of the time, every flourish those craftsmen devoted their lives to. And yet, our spaces are often hollow. Clean, yes. Efficient, certainly. But hollow.

"We inherited the capacity for extraordinary craft. Somewhere along the way, we also inherited permission to skip it."

Here is where I want to be precise, because this is not a manifesto for maximalism. Ornament for ornament's sake is its own kind of emptiness.

Minimalism, at its most honest, is a philosophy of restraint, reducing to what is necessary, and finding beauty in that reduction. It requires as much intention as any elaborate detail. A perfectly proportioned room with bare walls is a design decision. It takes courage.

But what we often mistake for minimalism today is something else entirely. It is essentialism born of exhaustion, not "this is all it needs" but "this is all we could manage." The absence of detail is not always a choice. Sometimes it is a concession.

The difference is felt immediately, even if it cannot always be articulated. A room that was designed to be spare carries stillness. A room that was never fully designed carries vacancy. One is a full stop. The other is an unfinished sentence.

We are living inside a peculiar contradiction. The industrial age gave us tools of extraordinary precision, and then trained us to use them as shortcuts rather than amplifiers. A CNC machine can carve a thousand identical panels in the time it once took to carve one. We use that fact to justify carving none.

The technology was always supposed to free us, to absorb the labour so that the thinking could deepen. Instead, it absorbed the thinking too. We delegated the doing to the machines, then delegated the vision to the budget. What remained was execution without authorship.

"We were always supposed to put effort into the things we love. The tools were meant to help us do more of that, not to excuse us from it."

That conversation with my colleague ended with the ideas still alive on the table, unresolved, waiting. But something shifted in me. The discomfort of that small sentence, "that's a lot of work”, became a question worth sitting with.

What are we actually willing to give to the things we care about?

Because spaces, like all made things, absorb the intention of those who make them. The houses that endure, the rooms that move people, the buildings that become part of a city's identity, they all carry the same invisible quality. Someone, at some point, refused to stop short of extraordinary.

That is not a function of budget, or era, or technology. It is a function of will.

The tools are ready. The question, as it has always been, is whether we are.