Trend reports are a dime a dozen. “State of the industry” assessments come and go. In its latest report, the International Interior Design Association takes on a more ambitious task: projecting the challenges of the future, then working backward to find out if designers are ready for them. The verdict? On a scale of 1 to 5, we’re currently at a 2.2, a grade the report charitably refers to as “starting.”

“A lot of our members are trying to figure out what’s next when it comes to their practices,” says Mark Bryan, the IIDA’s chief research and strategy officer, and the author of its first-ever Futures Readiness Index. “Where is the value of design headed, and what does it look like in an industry that is being fractured and changed?”

The forces doing the fracturing need little introduction. There’s climate change, the loneliness epidemic, geopolitical instability, an aging and longer-living population, and, of course, the colossus of AI looming over it all. Bryan’s hope is that, at this moment of inflection, designers can get a sobering look at the possible future, assess their own readiness (there’s a quiz at the end), and start to plan for what’s next.

The report itself, at 196 pages, covers a lot of ground. Some of it is more applicable to commercial designers (the IIDA’s key constituency) than residential designers—like the sections on the implications of ambient AI in doctor’s offices. However, many of the principles apply broadly across the entire industry, and some are specific to the home. Here are three key concepts from the report.

Prove It
It’s a long-held dream in the industry: What if designers could offer measurable proof to their clients that a beautiful, well-crafted home was objectively good for them? In his report, Bryan points out that advances in biometric scanning are making the premise less hypothetical every day. “People are paying for devices that record their heart rate and BMI, and they’re wearing their Oura rings to bed,” he says. “That’s going to be coming into the home.”

Injecting more “proof” into the design equation would change a lot—everything from the way designers market themselves (what if their past clients’ ultrahealthy Oura ring readouts were shared as commonly as portfolio photos?) to the way they get paid. “[Designers] could charge for whether or not a home performs better over time—if it actually keeps you healthier, or reduces the amount of times you have to clean the home; if you have to pay a housekeeper or cleaner less, or you don’t have to use as many products; if you’re able to reduce the energy that you use,” says Bryan. “All of those things are things that people would pay for, and I think residential designers now have the inroads to be able to start charging for those kinds of outcomes.”

Interestingly, the study flips the premise as a potential risk, imagining a scenario in which a design firm is sued because it promised to reduce patient anxiety in a healthcare project, and the client’s own study found that their anxiety had actually gone up. The situation is hypothetical, of course. But it’s a sobering reminder that if designers find a way to guarantee measurable outcomes, they’ll likely be held to them.

The Swiss Army Home
The application of residential design concepts to the outside world—offices, restaurants, hospitals—is nothing new. According to the IIDA’s report, the future will see more traffic going in the other direction, as the home becomes increasingly multipurpose. In a section labeled “A Home for Everything,” the study imagines a future in which “care, therapy, recovery, learning, aging, and the daily routines of work and wellbeing had moved into the home permanently.”

Given the pandemic’s shift toward work-from-home, the silver tsunami that will see America’s population age, an ongoing housing shortage, and the rise of in-home health facilities, it’s not hard to imagine a version of this future. The report suggests that residential designers could benefit from folding in skills and concepts from healthcare, hospitality and office work into their practice.

“The idea that the home is just a residential shell—what we’re seeing in the data is that it’s not really holding true,” says Bryan. “It still needs the aesthetics, it still needs beauty, it still needs privacy—but it [also] needs a lot more institutional work, and that changes perhaps what a residential designer might need to charge for.”

Judgment as Luxury
Unsurprisingly, there’s some Jetsons-esque artificial intelligence speculation in the IIDA’s report, but the most foundational point is how designers will maintain their value in the AI era. The thesis, in nutshell, is that a designer’s idiosyncratic human perspective—their taste, their intuition, their cumulative wisdom and expertise—is their most irreplaceable offering: “Many tasks that once demonstrated competence are becoming easier to automate, while the judgment that used to live quietly inside practice is becoming the work clients most need to see, trust and pay for.”

For Bryan, the defensible ground lies in the middle. “A lot of the front end [of a design project] is about research, then concepts, then the rendering, the floor plan, and even technical drawings—that’s all happening through technology now,” he says. “On the back end, there’s a lot of automation managing the procurement of the goods. … A lot of what’s coming through in the research is that middle part, which is about human judgment. That’s really what is untouchable by technology, and it’s the part that we feel the industry really needs to lean into. … How are you making your judgment more visible, and more trusted as well?”