The UK is home to the world's leading architects and designers. It has one of the largest design sectors in the world and boasts an architecture sector worth over £4 billion a year, plus London is "the world's global capital for creative design and construction skills".

A quick scroll through Dezeen offers visual confirmation of all this. But look out the window – our everyday environment appears very different. What we visualise, design and consume on our screens is increasingly distant from the reality of what's outside the front door. London may have the greatest concentration of architectural practices of any city in the world, but does it have the greatest concentration of good buildings?

Step outside the highest value areas in the capital, or across the country, and the answer is usually written several storeys tall in pastel-coloured render, rainscreen cladding panels, and hit-and-miss window patterns. It is evident in the lack of care for ordinary places; the playgrounds picked from catalogues, schools patched together with Portakabins, and stations surrounded by "value-engineered" palisade fencing.

Our public realm, public buildings and public infrastructure are more real and more important indicators of the health of the country's design industry than the latest shop interiors

Our public realm, public buildings and public infrastructure are more real and more important indicators of the health of the country's design industry than the latest shop interiors. Nowhere is this more critical than our attitude to the design of public housing. The Grenfell Tower fire is tragic proof that we have got the balance wrong – and an urgent challenge to architects and designers to question who we're really designing for.

To paraphrase Bruce Mau, how has the world of design become so disconnected from the design of the world?