I was twelve. I remember the escalator going up to the showroom. The higher I went, the more of the entrance I could see. First, colours. Then playful shapes. Then objects everywhere, designed with care down to the smallest detail. It was my first encounter with design.
At the top, I felt welcome straight away. The atmosphere was warm and comforting. As if I was at home.
These visits quickly became my Saturday afternoon ritual. I walked around the store like it was a museum. Except in this museum, I was allowed to take home a little piece of design for my bedroom.
Even today, the smell of cardboard boxes in the self-serve furniture area makes me smile. It's the scent of my happy moments: excitement, wonder, and the feeling of being where I belong.
I didn't know it had a name. Democratic design. But back then, I understood something that would change the way I see the world.
Beautiful, well-designed things are not only for the few.
It sounds simple, but at twelve, it was a revelation. Living surrounded by beautiful things was not a reward. It was a right.
This idea never left me. It became my compass. Since then, I have changed jobs, mediums and tools. My direction, though, has stayed the same.
Making others feel it too
What I received back then was not an object. It was permission.
If beauty could go into anyone's home, then it belonged to no one. It didn't stay behind glass. It wasn't only for magazines, or for people who already know. It could go into a child's bedroom, a narrow kitchen, a first flat.
So I wanted to create interiors where people feel good, too. To give others what I felt when I walked through those spaces.
I think that's where it all started. Not in the wish to make beautiful things. In the wish that everyone could feel it at home: feeling good, and feeling they belong.
One nuance matters. Democratic design is not the same as “cheap”. Cheap without beauty is a punishment. Beauty that isn't affordable is a privilege. Democratic design refuses to choose. It holds both together, and adds function, quality and sustainability. It's demanding. That's why it's a compass, not a slogan.
A compass doesn't draw the route. It helps you not to get lost.
The person before the plan
In 2015, I joined IKEA and worked in more than ten stores in France.
On the shop floor, I learned something I couldn't have learned in the same way anywhere else: you don't design for a floor plan. You design for a life.
A floor plan is clean. The walls are straight, the light is perfect, nobody lives there. Real life is messier. It has kids running around, a bike in the hallway, laundry drying, a sofa that becomes a bed when someone stays the night.
And it's not the same everywhere. I visited more than twenty stores across Europe. So many different ways of living. People don't live in Ghent the way they live in Toulon.
Designing from real life means starting with what gets in the way. The corner you can't use. The missing storage. The habit nobody will change. It's not a constraint. It's the raw material.
I learned that respect starts with observation. You can't design well for someone whose daily life you haven't taken the time to observe.
The person first. The plan second.
Many people, not an average
Then I became a product designer. The store only showed part of the story. The real experience starts before, at home, and goes on long after, in the most private moments. I wanted to support people all the way there.
So I moved from physical space to the screen. You could see it as a change of direction. But it's still the same compass, on a different medium.
On a screen, the five dimensions of democratic design stay the same. Only the material changes.
Form is the care given to what we see: a clear and harmonious interface, a journey without obstacles.
Function is the app's reason to exist: why it was made, and why people use it.
Quality is a product that keeps its promises. One that doesn't let you down when you need it.
Sustainability is an interface that stays usable over time, without needing the latest phone.
Low price is not only counted in euros. It's measured by what you need to use a screen: a good connection, good eyes, steady hands. That's the real price. And designing a website you can listen to, or use with a shaking hand, lowers that price for everyone.
But the word “democratic” hides a trap.
When we design for the many, it's tempting to design for the average. The typical user. The main use case. The one who fits in the boxes. But the average doesn't exist. Nobody lives an average life. And when we design for it, we leave out everyone at the edges: the person who can't see well, the one who has no time, the one who doesn't dare to ask.
Democratic design doesn't say “for most people”. It says “for each person”. The difference looks small on paper. In design, it's huge.
Many people are not a crowd. They are specific people, one by one.
What I took with me
I designed my first screens for MemenTop, a memory app for people living with a neurodegenerative disease. The medium was new to me. The method wasn't: I had learned it in the store.
First lesson: a high entry price leaves people outside. With MemenTop, that price was not paid in euros, but in the effort it took to remember. A password was already too expensive. So there wasn't one.
Second lesson: start from the person, not the plan. The simplest plan would have been to let a family member set everything up. But feeling at home also means deciding who comes in. In the app, it's the person living with the disease who opens the door.
And MemenTop brought me back to the starting idea: designing for each person. Working on accessibility, I saw it up close. When you remove an obstacle for one person, you remove it for so many others.
So what now?
I left the big blue box to take democratic design beyond interiors. But I never left the twelve-year-old who stood at the top of the escalator, amazed, and understood that beauty wasn't only for other people. I still create for her.
It's not nostalgia. It's a high standard. Every time I design something, I ask myself the same question: who am I really talking to? Because the more personal something is, the more universal it becomes.
This question isn't only for designers. We all design for others, often without knowing it. The video maker who adds subtitles, or doesn't. The architect who puts the ramp at the front entrance, or behind the building. The parent who puts up a shelf at a child's height. Each time, the same choice: to design for the people who can already manage, or for everyone else too.
And you, in what you create, who are you still leaving outside?
