Design is often understood through objects, outputs, and outcomes. Yet its most profound impact lives in the physical, digital, and emotional spaces where human connection is made possible.
This year’s International Design Day, hosted by the Society for Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD), invites designers to focus on these thresholds where ideas become experiences, where individuals become communities, and where design shapes how we belong, relate, and coexist.
Design isn’t just what we make. It’s what happens between people in the physical, digital, and emotional spaces where human connection is made possible. These are the thresholds where design mediates how we meet, understand, and care for one another.
Human relationships are rarely formed in a single moment or through a grand gesture. They are shaped gradually, through transitions, shared attention, pauses, and encounters that often go unnoticed. These in-between spaces—where people arrive, wait, navigate, listen, or hesitate— quietly influence how we belong and how we move through the world together.
Design plays a powerful role in shaping these moments. Whether intentional or accidental, design structures how connection unfolds. It determines who feels welcome, who feels excluded, and how meaning is exchanged across difference. And yet, these spaces are often the least discussed, least measured, and least consciously designed.
The Spaces In Between asks designers to slow down and look more closely at the thresholds where connection is formed, and where it can just as easily fracture.
More information to follow in coming weeks.