If the Coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated anything, it is that our societal systems have shifted into the artificial worlds of commerce and economics far enough to leave both health and happiness behind. Our systems do not necessarily serve us. Rather, we can spend our lives serving them.

What do we do now as designers?

What we conceive and direct to completion must address one recursive question. ‘Did the interests of general people take pole position’?

There can be many examples. Here are two negative ones.

If an airport decreases lounge space available to travellers who need to sit waiting and cuts off views to the tarmac in order to accommodate retail, our system does not serve us. We serve the system.

If economic models of affordable housing reduce the magnificent diversity and culture poor families bring to the city urban family’s needs to twenty-five sq.m, our economic models do not serve us. We serve the economic model.

The Coronavirus pandemic can be a re-set for design through a change of priorities we serve.

The fact that we are and can be only one part of many in the Earth’s ecology must take precedence over the arrogance we have shown our planet in the industrialized age. Irrevocably, this will reconnect us traditional morphology, planning and our fascinating socio-spatial history as we discover and shape a ‘human’ renaissance.

Before Coronavirus, we used the ‘Three EEE’ checklist. Ecology, Environment, Economics. Now it is time to re-set and amend to the ‘Three H’ checklist: Human, Health, Happiness.

The way I see it Health and Happiness will implicitly account for Ecology and Environment both. As far as Economics is concerned, it will have to mend its ways.