PriestmanGoode Trend Report 2026
Theme 01
Comfort is the New Ambition
From Amtrak's reframe of passengers as guests to biophilic aviation interiors, why emotional intelligence is becoming a baseline design requirement, not a premium.
Theme 02
Accessibility: the word we keep misusing
Why designing for the full spectrum of human needs isn't a niche consideration and what it looks like when it's done without compromise.
Theme 03
Responsible design: discipline, not direction
Sustainability has a branding problem. From closed-loop material innovation to designing for disassembly.
Theme 04
Experience over statement.
The most referenced projects of the year were the ones that asked the simplest questions, and answered them with design.
Theme 05
Copenhagen: handmade, human, deliberately slow.
In a landscape still absorbing AI-generated imagery and parametric mass production, 3 Days of Design offered something increasingly rare: evidence of process.
What the Design World is Asking?
The first half of 2026 took us to Hamburg, Milan, London, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Copenhagen, and across all of these events, the same set of questions kept surfacing, dressed in different materials and different vocabularies.
This isn't a trends report in the traditional sense. It maps five structural shifts in what people expect from the designed world, and what that means for the briefs we should all be asking of ourselves.