Why Privacy Is Becoming Architecture's Most Urgent Design Problem

May 2026 | NYC
Open-plan offices, hybrid work, and constant connectivity have quietly eliminated something people used to take for granted: a place to be unseen and unheard. On May 19, StarMaps convened a panel at the Shaw Contract Showroom in New York City to ask what it means for architecture and product design to answer that loss — and whether privacy can be designed back into daily life.

The discussion brought together Winka Dubbeldam, architect, founder of Archi-Tectonics, and Director & CEO of SCI-Arc; Julie Lasky, design journalist and critic and longtime contributor to The New York Times; Walter Craven, founder of Kabin and creator of the Performance Sanctuary™ line; and John Crews, Director of Design, Education and Porcelain Studio at Shaw Contract.

The panel traced the crisis back to its clearest flashpoint: pandemic lockdowns, when home and office collapsed into a single room with no boundary between them. From there, the conversation moved through the physiology of focus, the paradox of acoustic over-insulation, and the specific material choices — flooring, paneling, zoning — that designers now lean on to signal boundaries in spaces that no longer have walls. As Craven put it, the underlying need hasn't changed: "Every human needs a place to retreat, reset and resume." Dubbeldam framed the solution less as retreat than as balance, arguing that in a well-designed workplace, "the contrast is actually where the beauty lies" — collaborative space giving private space its meaning, and vice versa.

Watch the full panel discussion, "Design & The Crisis of Privacy," above. The full transcript can be found here.