As global retail and consumer experience leader at Gensler, the mega architecture and design company, Lara Marrero took the pandemic a bit harder than the rest of us. Much of the work she does was suddenly off limits, and its future called into question. But after more than 20 years strategizing and designing for the ways people interact with retail environments, the shock of the pandemic was a chance to redirect.

Retail design today, Marrero argues, is much better, more engaging, and more effective than it was pre-pandemic. By forcing designers to tackle issues like overcrowding, public health, and the increasingly present digital veil hanging over physical shopping experiences, designers are now doing more than ever to improve the way people engage in retail environments. In the face of e-commerce and dying malls, retail is still finding new ways to connect with people, in real life. Maerero’s optimism about the future of retail and experience design suggests the pandemic may have been one of the best things to happen to retail in decades.

Fast Company: When you look at the work you’re doing, what do you think are the biggest forces or trends shaping design today?

Lara Marrero: It comes down to the PHD—the physical, the human, and the digital, and the intersection between the three. If you think about it like a Venn diagram, the human is the overlap and the physical and the digital are coming together. I think the biggest thing is we need to de-silo ourselves. In the past all of these different groups were innovating on different focus areas, so you’d find innovation in pockets but you wouldn’t have it all coming together to solve the total needs of an individual. So this is the moment in time where de-siloing, cutting across disciplines, and coming together to solve for the needs of people and the needs of places and the way that the environment is being affected around the world by different climate crises. All of these things are going to require a different kind of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary thinking to bring together solutions that will in fact create the spaces and places and products and society that we’re going to be living in in the future.

You are a strategist whose role is focused on retail and human experiences. Obviously the pandemic was such a shock to both of those. Now that the doors have reopened and people are reengaging with these kinds of spaces, are you back to doing what you were doing before the pandemic, or has the work changed?

We had dreamed of moments where we could blend the physical, the human, and the digital together, and we had dreamed of moments when we were designing retail brands and retail spaces looking at how service interplayed. But the way that we were able to accelerate what the baseline of designing for consumer experience is and designing for employee experience has been really unprecedented.

We used to design plans, where we would have fixtures and we would show products, but now you show how people move through those spaces as well. It’s like you’re planning for people. You’re planning for interactions with the staff, you’re planning for digital interactions. You’re planning for how one might take a meandering journey versus how one can go in for task mode. It’s such an unbelievable opportunity to really design spaces that are relevant for the people that are going to use them. And we’re doing it now on everything. The pandemic has moved us into that space because we were so conscious of people in the environment and how much space we needed to give them. But now we can look at things like flow, and service and how space can be a tool for that to happen in a much more robust way. So that’s probably the most exciting thing, which is how much our processes and problem solving have changed so that we can create more meaningful impact.

When it comes to the work designers do, what should they be paying attention to? Are you seeing issues the industry needs to be taking on with a little more passion or authority?

I think one thing that time gives us over the course of our lifespan is we start to appreciate the things that we have and the things we don’t the older we get, and we start to really value time. Over time our perspective changes and we’re exposed to different challenges that other people have and that we will have over time. I’ve just started realizing that in my hands, I’m either starting to be arthritic, or something. If you think about innovation, so much of innovation is personal. It’s a challenge that one sees that they want to solve for themselves or someone close to them. But what if we widened our perspective to those that have needs that we might not have.

Like, I’ve never really thought of what I need to think about when I’m designing a space for people who might not have as much dexterity in their hands. It’s the idea of how we approach design through an empathetic lens, but we also are becoming more educated on the issues that people are having that need solving. To me, that is the importance of it. It’s like if we can all share the burden that one person carries, we can see its impact in so many ways, we can really start to shape what we’re doing in terms of the places we’re designing and the people we’re designing for with such meaning. Design should empower all of us equally to experience the world around us.