This year’s Design House Colombia invited designers, architects and creatives to disrupt convention, to probe the unknown, and embrace failure as part of the process. The result is a provocation: a rethinking of the obvious.

The choice of a material is anything but trivial. In design, opting for steel over wood—or an innovative material over a traditional one—doesn’t just shape a project’s aesthetics; it carries functional, environmental, and even social implications. How do materials age? How sustainable are they? What impact do they have on biodiversity and human health? Once sidelined, these questions have now become unavoidable.

For decades, designers followed purely aesthetic criteria or whatever was on offer in catalogues. Rarely did they ask where materials came from, how they were produced, or how long it took them to arrive on-site. But in an era defined by climate crisis and the push for sustainable practice, these considerations have taken on new urgency.

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