Should designers still go to design fairs? There was a time when no one would have thought to ask. Of course we should. They’re part of the global design calendar, as fixed as the seasons. Lately, though, several designers we have spoken to have started to think twice. Festivals and design weeks have grown larger and louder, and a few days away from the studio are not as easy to justify as they once were. We have wondered the same, yet here we are, flying to Copenhagen this evening for 3daysofdesign.

What follows is more a letter to ourselves than anything, left where you might read it too: one studio to another, on what these weeks have taught us over the years and what we mean to do differently.

What do we go for? For us it’s four things, and we suspect they are close to your own. Inspiration. Connection, the kind that only happens when everyone you know is in one city for a single week. The makers and houses we already specify, and the new ones we are always hoping to find, worth travelling a long way to see in person. And content, naturally. Proving you were there has now become an expectation in itself, part of the week as much as anything else.

Milan Design Week is the one that got us thinking, which feels almost ungrateful, because we love it. New work everywhere you turn, the most interesting people, whole rooms of the chic and the brilliant. None of what follows is a complaint. It is the particular ache of loving something so popular it has become hard to navigate. The fair is too big precisely because it is too good. The crowds are not a fault. They are the proof. And still, the bigger it gets, the harder it becomes to reach the thing you came for.

We spent the better part of an afternoon queuing in the heat (April in Milan does not always oblige with sunshine; that day it did) to get into a building we would otherwise never have the privilege of seeing inside, the sort of address that stays shut all year and opens only for the week. And it was more than worth the wait. On a quieter morning it would have floored us. But we saw it shoulder to shoulder with a few hundred others, phones held above every head, ushered into the next room before we had really stood in the last. There was no time to take it in, to look properly at the pieces, to find the person whose work it was and ask. We saw all of it and absorbed none of it, and left with the photograph everyone else took that day.

The fear of missing out is also merciless. You make a plan, and by lunch on the second day someone you admire posts from an exhibition that was never on your list, and the plan is gone. Last year we ran across the city to reach a showroom before it closed, arriving five minutes after the doors had shut (devastating, at the time). It seem to happen to everyone at least once. And it does not end there. A week on, long after the fair has finished, a show you never made it to surfaces on somebody's Instagram, and you feel it all over again, for something long since over.

Then there is the guilt nobody admits to. We had a long lunch with a friend that ran hours longer than we anticipated. The whole time, part of us was counting the rooms we were not in, telling ourselves that a few days away from the studio should amount to more than a long table and good conversation. As if sitting still were the one thing a fair would not permit.

The biggest presentations are among the finest things you will see all year, spectacle in the best sense, a space turned into something you could not have dreamed up yourself. It almost feels a shame to miss them. But we come as designers, not just enthusiasts, and increasingly that means missing a few, because what we actually came for is elsewhere. The smaller, independent showings, often someone’s own studio or a residence, are no less beautiful, and often more so: the scent of the place, the sound of it, the thought and detail worked into every corner. Not to mention that you walk straight in. You can stand still, ask how a piece was made and whether it would work in a project, talk to whoever made it when they are there, and take the whole of it in. These are the ones we come home thinking about.

Should designers still go? We think so, and we would still tell you to book the flight. We know now, more or less, how we want to do it this time.

We make a plan and mostly keep to it, clear on who we actually need to see. When something irresistible appears on somebody's stories (as it always does, usually around one o’clock on the second day), we fold it into tomorrow or let it go, because you cannot see all of a fair and there is no use pretending otherwise.

The big events may stay in the plan, but the independents come first. We leave room for spontaneity where we can, which is easier at some fairs than others. Copenhagen allows for it. Others, less so. Either way, the point is not to see everything. It is to see enough, properly.

We take a few photographs from our own point of view, and then the phone goes in the bag. We sit down for coffee and pause. We look properly. We talk to people, which sounds obvious until you notice how little of it you actually manage when you are rushing from one place to the next. No guilt, no fear of missing out, no tally of the hours away from our desks.

In a few hours, we leave for Copenhagen and 3daysofdesign, from 10 to 12 June. Sharon knows the city well, though never during the fair, and this will be my third year. It has always felt slower and more intimate than the others, a whole city given over to design for three days: cycling between showrooms, long coffees, morning plates and pastries, and a food scene too good to treat as an afterthought. This year, I want to know whether that feeling still holds now that the fair has grown. Sharon will see it without the memory of previous years, which may make her the better judge.