5 Reasons Materiality Deserves More Attention During Chicago Design Week

Chicago Design Week is built for discovery. Across NeoCon showrooms, Fulton Market activations, pop-ups, and manufacturer spaces throughout the city, designers will encounter new colors, forms, finishes, furnishings, and product systems competing for attention. But a question of greater urgency than “What’s new?” may be hovering just beneath the surface: What are these products really made of, and what impact do they carry?

That question is becoming harder to separate from the future of commercial interiors. Material choices influence embodied carbon, indoor environmental quality, product longevity, circularity, maintenance, and the stories designers can credibly bring back to clients. Materiality is no longer a niche sustainability topic. It is a practical design conversation hiding in plain sight.

That conversation is grounded in the complementary expertise of Kenn Busch and Jon Strassner, two industry voices focused on making material sustainability more transparent and usable. Busch, founder of Material Intelligence, has spent years helping designers and manufacturers better understand wood-based products, decorative surfaces, sourcing, and performance. Strassner, a former manufacturer-side leader and former ASID chief sustainability officer, now works with companies on impact, certification, supply-chain transparency, and climate storytelling. Together, they frame materiality as a design lens for evaluating carbon, health, circularity, product performance, and client value. Here are five reasons that conversation deserves more attention during Chicago Design Week.

1. Carbon is in the details.

Musing on conversations held at The MART in 2025, Strassner first acknowledged that the interior design community and the manufacturing base have opened discussions about materiality. Still, there’s room for a greater exchange of ideas due to evolving building and energy standards—as well as shifting awareness regarding material health.

2. Recycled is only the starting point.

Busch expanded on the need for more mature materials evaluation questions. “The conversation used to be: ‘Is it recycled, or can I recycle it?’ And that was the beginning and end of [the materials conversation]. Well, I think that’s pretty far in the rearview mirror now.”

3. Transparency is a design tool.

The health conversation also requires a careful balance. Strassner quipped that the industry can no longer assume interiors products are harmless simply because no one is “eating the furniture.” But he also cautioned against turning material health into an impossible purity test for either specifiers or manufacturers.

Manufacturers may not have every answer yet. What matters is whether they are asking better questions, documenting what they know, and working toward greater transparency. Strassner observed that strict demands for product certifications can be “a little bit short-sighted,” and that as a result, designers could be “overlooking a lot of really good solutions that just don’t happen to have that certification.”

On the other side of that exchange, he offered an example of how a manufacturer might respond to inquiries about transparency, labels, and circularity: “We don’t have a Declare label yet, but… we’ve reviewed our bill of materials and we know everything that goes into this product. And the bill of materials is available for you. You know, this is our supply chain. We know our supply chain inside and out.”

The point is progress, not perfection: Every step toward better materials health gives designers more to work with.

4. Circularity has more than one doorway.

Circularity may be one of the most promising material conversations in commercial interiors, but Busch and Strassner both cautioned against treating it as a simple formula.

For Strassner, the goal is to move beyond a linear “take, make, waste” economy by keeping products, components, and materials in use longer. That may include reuse, remanufacturing, refurbishment, repairability, disassembly, field serviceability, better shipping strategies, or smarter new-product design. Busch added that the definition becomes more nuanced when natural materials enter the discussion. In wood-based products, circularity may also involve managed forestry, regeneration, carbon storage, recycled urban wood, or second-life composite panels.

Both also acknowledged the practical challenges. One is balancing the business imperative to sell new products with responsible materials management. Another expanding the industry’s understanding of circularity beyond reuse alone. The common ground is clear: Circularity is not one factor designers consider at the end of a product’s life. It is a series of decisions that begin before a product is specified.