Piecing Together The Empty Interior reflects on a body of digitally–produced photographic collages: “The Myth of Home” explores the psychological complexities of home as related to loss and longing. “Portraits” and “Portraits II” explore the room as a form of self–portraiture. In each of these works the room is portrayed through photogram images that depict an interior as empty, or in other words, devoid of people and objects. Here, an empty interior exists suspended in time in a state of entering a future or exiting a past. In this sense, an interior becomes an imaginary space pieced together in a virtual media and open to the construction of new interpretations about the architectural narrative of the room itself. The psychology and principles of Gestalt, and its influence on perception, provide a framework that situates these works as encounters with internal states of being; the mnemonic experience of space; and the embodiment of making images. These photographic works explore the transitory nature of empty interiors relative to memory and anticipation.

Good sleep quality is important to cognition, physical health, mental well–being, and creativity—factors critical to academic and professional success. But, undergraduate students often report engaging in short, irregular, and poor–quality sleep. Anecdotal and questionnaire data suggest that poor sleep habits might be prevalent in students who are in studio– or project–based majors that implicitly encourage consecutive nights of disrupted sleep to complete projects. We investigated sleep quantity and quality using both objective measures (wristband actigraphy monitoring) and subjective measures (sleep diary) in 28 interior design undergraduate students for a 7–day period. Our primary aim was to measure sleep quantity (total sleep time) and quality (e.g., nighttime awakenings) and to compare whether undergraduate interior design students’ objective measures of sleep (actigraphy) differed from their subjective measures (sleep diary). The secondary aim was to investigate detrimental outcomes of poor sleep habits on laboratory–based measures of cognitive function (symmetry span, prospective memory, Raven's progressive matrices, remote associates task) that were administered pre– and poststudy. We found that the interior design students in our study overestimated their total sleep time by 36 minutes, that 79% of students slept for fewer than 7 hours at least three nights per week, and that many students cycled between nights of restricted/short sleep and recovery/long sleep. Importantly, students who maintained short sleep durations, highly variable night–to–night sleep durations, or had fragmented sleep (i.e., waking after sleep onset) demonstrated pre– to poststudy declines on the laboratory measure of creativity (remote associates task). These findings suggest the need for further investigations, which may lead to a broader discussion of studio culture and the role of the “all–nighter,” both in professional practice and in design education.

Interior design, like other applied disciplines, has a clear career cycle requiring education and professional experience before becoming eligible for examination. Internships are often encouraged in academic curriculums for increased career placement and enhancement of student learning outcomes; they also serve as a benchmark for academic programs to evaluate their curriculum and its relevance to practice. As the design industry rapidly shifts the scope and needs in projects, it becomes more difficult for academic programs to assess practitioners’ values as they relate to recent interns and entry–level hires. Using a social constructivist approach, this longitudinal study aims to better understand practitioners’ perceptions of soft and hard skill sets necessary for emerging interior design professionals. This study utilizes content analysis to evaluate practitioners’ responses ( N = 260) from 2006 to 2014 through a survey questionnaire that consisted of open–ended questions aimed to evaluate senior–level interior design students’ performance during the required 400–hour internship at a mid–sized Southeastern university. The findings showed that soft skills were more often listed as positive attributes where interns performed exceedingly well. Furthermore, soft skills affected the willingness of practitioners to hire interns.

Stress—as an aspect in the contemporary university context—reflects the personal and professional demands felt across many parts of society. The research team sought to understand how stress is spoken about as well as experienced in professional creative courses. Terms such as stress, stressful, or being stressed represent both the negative and positive aspects associated with learning. As interior architecture (IA) educators, could the positive aspects be facilitated in the future, while the negative aspects are reduced, by building on the knowledge gained through this study? A number of issues were revealed through which tension was demonstrated as grounds for stress to develop. The issues arising include conflicting expectations between the university, staff, and students; lack of student understanding of the core discipline activities and culture; student levels of maturity; individual variation in response to learning situations, such as design studios, group work, or industry placements; and the university context and culture. In turn, these issues were often linked to miscommunication—that is, although concepts and issues were being addressed through interactions in the university context, what was being said or demonstrated was not what was being heard or understood and applied by the students. Miscommunication can be an instigator of stressful situations for students, and if this manifests in a negative way, students can experience physical, cognitive, and emotional issues that can alter their learning potential and enjoyment. For lecturers in contemporary universities, miscommunication is relevant, and a need to improve clarity and to foster shared meaning seems evident. Initially, a summary of background literature sets the scene for the study. Then, our action–based methodology is outlined before discussing the issues identified and the implications they hold for learning and teaching as well as for future research. The findings are presented to also inform staff and curriculum designers involved in other creative professional courses such as design, architecture, performance, film, and interior design.

In Western countries, the discipline of interior design has struggled to define itself from the beginning. One reason is that designing interiors is a multifaceted, layered, even interdisciplinary process. One has to deal with architectural environments as well as objects, with spaces as well as more ephemeral backdrops. Moreover, because designing interiors is not very different from certain everyday activities, interior professionals want to dissociate their activities from everyday decorating. Nomenclature has played an important role in trying to professionalize. By employing the term of “interior architect,” professional practitioners have sought to insist on the distance that separates their work from everyday design practices. However, interior architecture has also wanted to avoid being seen as a subcategory of architecture. As a result, alternative terms have circulated, which have been equally question–begging. By means of a case study of one country's attempt to professionalize the practice of designing interiors, this essay will uncover how professional identities emerged and were labeled in postwar Belgian Flanders. We will show how different profiles, ranging from schooled interior architects to self–made domestic advisors and interior decorators, enabled practitioners to approach interiors differently and sometimes design in different ways. At the same time, we will investigate why the term “Interior architect” was employed by all the profiles of practitioners. The historically and culturally specific case study will be framed against the internationally ongoing process of professionalization. The road toward professionalization in Flanders runs parallel to that in a lot of Western countries. The Flemish case is remarkable, though, in that issues of nomenclature and identity formation were already heavily debated, even taken to court, from the mid–1950s until the mid–1960s. While in North American and Australian educational programs and professional contexts, the gradual adoption of descriptions such as “interior design” and “interior architecture” is of more recent vintage, this process took place in Flanders already in the 1960s. With our historically early case study—the first Flemish interior design program dates back to 1946—we want to contribute to the ongoing international debate about the professionalization of the interior discipline as well as discussions on nomenclature and the complex relationship between professionals and amateurs. Through a historically and culturally specific case study, this article will show how different profiles, ranging from schooled interior architects to self–made interior advisors and interior decorators, enabled practitioners to approach interiors differently and sometimes to design in different ways.