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.
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Interior: A State of Becoming 2012 IDEA Symposium
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-.
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Conference Chair Wendy Beckwith La Roche College …
