Rethinking Inside the Box

Thinking inside the Box: a Reader in Interior Design for the 21st Century, 2007

Interiors is an evolving yet slippery discipline. Whilst the interior is everywhere, it is nevertheless ephemeral and difficult to define. The interior domain is itself saturated with the everyday artefacts of consumption; it's a platform in which to project lifestyle; a place to benchmark fashionable social mores, to test patterns of behaviour and ritual; and the place of dwelling, sanctuary, memory and association. Interiors is becoming an increasingly diverse field of spatial design enquiry which - through education at least - operates without that familiar artefactual framework so common to partner disciplines of art, product and fashion. Interiors education operates within, and is limited by, paper space abstraction of visualising rather than doing. Whilst others have identifiable notions of disciplinary craft, what is the craft of interiors? Within education and practice, interiors occupy multiple identities, yet its historical, theoretical and contextual framework remains patchy, and is frequently contested and unclaimed territory in comparison to those of other disciplines. How, therefore, might we speculate about the role, validity and purpose of interiors in the twenty-first century? Thinking Inside the Box: A Reader in Interior Design for the 21st Century is an interior theory reader designed to enable students, academics, researchers and practitioners access to the broad and evolving nature of interiors thinking today. This collection of essays, by prominent thinkers, practitioners and key authors in the field from Australia, the UK, Italy, New Zealand, Turkey, Canada and the USA addresses an eclectic range of issues: the theoretical and conceptual nature of ‘doubleness’ between an interiors choreographed image and its actuality in the emergence of the interior; the slow home; textiles and feminism; branding the discipline; the relationship between the interior and the enclave in the contemporary age of terror; the regulation of the profession of interiors and deregulation of education; rereading theories of interior space; Hertzian interior space describing the lived traces of use, occupation and environment, amongst many others. This publication emerged initially from the international interiors conference and exhibition `Thinking Inside the Box: Interior Design Education in the 21st Century: New Visions, New Horizons & New Challenges' at the Lighthouse, Scotland's Centre for Architecture and Design held in March 2007, and organized by the Interiors Forum Scotland. Established in May 2005, the IFS comprise the leading Scottish interior programmes at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (University of Dundee), Edinburgh College of Art, the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow Metropolitan College (incl. City of Glasgow College) and Napier University in Edinburgh. This reader resulted from continued discussion and a shared concern and passion for the field of interior design. Like the earlier conference and exhibition, this reader is designed to provoke within the international community of interior designers and interior architects a desire to rediscover, reframe and perhaps reclaim the field of interior design; and, through the IFS, to establish an annual conference platform which places interior design / interior architecture firmly at the centre of critical debate, rather than on the margins of other design disciplines. In reading this publication one may sense that interiors, for all its diversity and indeed doubt, is re-emerging as a dynamic spatial activity with shared concerns and challenges: identity, anxiety over unregulated expansion, challenging perceptions, sharing good practice across an international interior community, advocacy, philosophy, reflecting and rethinking our discipline and issues of gender, amongst others. Very early on the IFS explored thinking inside rather than outside the metaphorical box as a vehicle for an event for the interiors community. Thus, began a number of free-ranging discussions about the nature, theory and practice of interior design, about the educational vision driving our institutions, the international dimension, the impact radical practice may have on visionary teaching, the emerging of recent interior research communities and theories, and how we might best promote, support and advocate excellence within this unique discipline. What we all shared, to some extent, was a feeling that, when compared to many design disciplines, interiors is somewhat hazily defined, perhaps undervalued and yet, as a result, full of possibilities. What has made both the IFS and Thinking Inside the Box possible is the relative intimacy of scale of the higher education interiors sector within Scotland, within which there exists a surprising diversity of programmes. At the time of writing, Scotland supported six honours degree courses in interiors, compared to some two hundred in England and Wales combined. This meant that it was relatively easy for the Interiors Forum Scotland to get started, to get talking and to get doing. However, it would be wrong to mistake small numbers for uniformity. The interiors degree courses of Scotland, situated as they are in different institutions and different cities, represent a wide range of viewpoints on the discipline. Post-industrial, style-conscious Glasgow, where interiors is driven by retail and hospitality, is a world (and fifty minutes on the train) away from staid, bourgeois Edinburgh, where museology, conservation and heritage are only now giving way to other disciplines. The Fine Art traditions of Duncan of Jordanstone, Glasgow School of Art, and Edinburgh College of Art have a very different pedigree to the more practical and professional focus of the former polytechnics. And of course, staff and students, attracted by these combinations of place and ethos, serve to reinforce and exaggerate these characteristics.

Interior: A State of Becoming 2012 IDEA Symposium, 2012

This paper addresses the question of becoming in relation to interior design as a practice of designing interiors both physical and mental. An understanding of ‘interior’ in a substantive way shapes current interior design practice. This is evident in the frequent use of the term ‘the interior’ which suggests some thing – a space or a subject – which exists as an independent entity. The proposition of becoming invites different ways of thinking about interior making – a shift from things to processes, from the individual to the process of individuation, from form to information, from space to time and movement. The focus of this paper is a research project conducted through undergraduate design studios and PhD research. The project addresses the environments (physical, psychological and situational) of young people living in residential care houses. The studios explore how the production of interior designs might affect, transform and/or benefit the physical and emotional wellbeing of adolescents living in these houses. Called Beyond Building, the project invites students to consider the question of interior design as a practice not confined to/contained by the inside of a building. Instead the invitation is to think about interior design as an interior-making; as a process of interiorization. Relational conditions – between people, programs, different times of day and night, schedules, colour, light, tactility, psychological and affective qualities of design and interiors – were highlighted. This also shifts design as practice from one concerned with structures and physical form to one that takes into account temporal as well as spatial conditions. Through the projects, the practice of interior design becomes apparent in relation to the production of subjectivities – from fixed subjectivities based on identity and being to ones that attempt to enable subjectivities to move, change, become. This research contributes to the growing focus of interior design in relation to wellbeing. It has the potential to offer up a different way of understanding interior design through posing the question of interior as ?interior and posing the potential ‘to inspire new modes of subjectivization’ (Deleuze 2006, 260). Key Words: interior design, interiorization, subjectivity, individuation, becoming, Deleuze, Simondon, interior-exterior, self-.

2017

This paper chronicles the evolution of Interior Architecture through the lens of the Interior Architecture programme at Oxford Brookes University. Interior Architecture as a proper academic field originated from architecture but with a specific scope-to investigate and design the experiential/spatial conditions of buildings. This led it to be influenced significantly by other disciplines in regard to methodology, pedagogy, and even the subject matter of the programme. Whereas naturally it shares most of its critical framework with architecture and interior design, and draws upon similar theoretical contributions and practices, Interior Architecture incorporates findings and methodologies from other disciplines such as behavioural psychology, social studies, and research on perception. It has now consolidated into an independent academic field, able to offer significant insights on design strategies for people in the built environment, which can be applied meaningfully back into architecture studies. Specifically, Interior Architecture at Oxford Brookes has placed the experience of space as the subject matter in the built environment through innovative design briefs, and academic publication. The design work and research produced by its students and staff is turning into a compressive methodology of design. This incorporates the idea that programmes of occupation are a-priori design strategies, conducted with an appreciation of variable spatial conditions and perceptive atmospheric qualities.

Thinking Inside the Box. A Reader in interiors for the 21st century (London: Middlesex University Press), 2007

A canon can be defined as a collection of works deemed significant for a particular practice at a point in time; as a repository of those works and as a transmitter of this knowledge through images and words. Writing on the architectural canon, Miriam Gusevich observes that ‘the significance and status of a building as architecture is not dependent on some pre-established set of attributes, on some essential features, but on its status as a cultural object established through critical discourse’ [1]. Are there canonical interiors; spaces that have influenced the practice of interior design more than others? Or does the nature of this multidisciplinary practice make a canon, as it is known from architecture, impossible? Undesirable, even? The focus of this paper is a forum titled What’s in a canon? The state of interior design at the beginning of the 21st century. The forum was held in Melbourne, Australia on 17 October 2006 and invited editors of Australia’s design media, academics, graduates and interior design practitioners to respond to the provocation: ‘What’s in a canon?’ The question had two potential readings in this context: to question and evaluate the value of a canon for interior design; and as an invitation to identify examples of interior design which are significant at this point in time to the practice of interior design. It should be noted that there was not an underlying assumption that there should be a canon. This paper will analyse the debates, discussion and interiors offered at the forum. In the process, it will consider the design of interiors where the concept of interior is re-posed and in so doing, pose the question of what a history and theory of interior design could be and what kind of platform for practice might be produced. It is hoped that it will provide impetus for new ways of thinking and designing interiors. Keywords: canon, interior, design history/ theory, architecture, practice [1] Gusevich, M. The Architecture of Criticism: A Question of Autonomy. In Kahn, A., ed. Drawing, Building, Text, p.11 (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1991).

2010

Mobility and Design, 2014

The boundaries between creative thinking and business sense are thickening in the profession of interior design. We often find ourselves compromising one to the other. Such conflict is often accentuated by the increased emphasis in academic programs on abstract creativity without venues and connection to the real world. In reverse, practices are more and more inclined to practicality, flashiness and cost reduction. This paper addresses the issues emanating from this conflict. While academic programs lack coherence, interdisciplinary approaches and collaboration between various programs and industries, professionals are in desperate need for regulation and legislation. More than ever, the challenges that face both the academic and the professional world should come under scrutiny. However, this study will review and examine recent literature about the ongoing debate and critique found in various circles, which seek to minimize this schism. Especial attention will be given, throughout this paper, to what should students expect, and to what design process to adopt and most of all under what academic vision should all the above fall, in order to push research in that direction.

2012

The IDEA 2012 Inaugural Research Exhibition An Interior Affair: a State of Becoming was a pilot to test the perceived ambiguity of the requirements provided by Australia's Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) and New Zealand's Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) for creative works to be recognised as research through exhibition. A peer-reviewed exhibition model was piloted for interior design/interior architecture in order to provide appropriate quality assurance processes for creative works (See online interactive living archive: http://www.interiorbecomings.com/). A paper (see refernce below) outlining the model was presented at the IDEA 2012 symposium. In summary: 16 exhibitions (23 designer-researchers from United Kingdom, United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia). Exhibition feedback: 'The exhibition proved that the physical experience of creative works [artefacts / installations] and the coming together of researchers and viewers adds an important dimension to research, its formats, their communication and exchange of ideas' (personal communication exhibition attendee). An IDEA Working Group: EXHIBITION AS RESEARCH Chair, A/Prof Marina Lommerse, Curtin University, Australia Jane Lawrence, University of South Australia, Australia Sven Mezhoud, Monash University, Australia Stuart Foster, Massey University, New Zealand PAPER: S.Mehzoud, J. Lawrence, S.Foster & M. Lommerse, An exhibition model to enable recognition and evaluation of creative works as research in interior design/interior architecture, IDEA Symposium Proceedings: Interior: a State of Becoming, Curtin University, Perth, p. 39, 2012.

The International Journal of Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design, 2015

Interior design is about the integration of numerous interior elements and products that are chosen to satisfy various spatial requirements. The unity of all surfaces, materials and products create an integral architectural character and language. Important architects of the modern period believed in "total work of art" and they felt responsible for the design and overseeing of the building's totality: shell, accessories, furnishings, and landscape. Even if they were industrial products, the same design language shaped them. Today, different designers design most of the components that shape the built environment. In other words, design and manufacturing phases of "space" and "spatial components" are considered as independent processes. On the other hand, space has contextual determinants and every specific interior is fed with different contextual data. Therefore, the most important requirement of today's design approaches is to create a new design language in relation with new technologies and new ways of living without neglecting the local and cultural differences that create architectural identity and sense of place. In this paper, contemporary design approaches will be discussed through examples in order to evaluate the role of spatial components in interior design.