Interior Design Studio V

The fifth and most mature design studio — the step up from the home to the complex, public, inclusive interior: institutional buildings, recreational spaces such as auditoria and halls, and the adaptive re-use of historic and abandoned sites. It is taught around the disciplines a public project demands that a private one does not, and it is honest about the ways students get them wrong. The first correction sets the tone: a public building is not a bigger house, because you design for many users you will never meet, so a written brief and a programme replace one client's taste, and building codes become the starting floor — a legal minimum to clear, never the design itself and never proof that a scheme is good. Its heart is inclusive design. It draws the line between universal design — designing for the widest range of people from the very start, so no one needs a special adaptation — and accessible or barrier-free design bolted on as an afterthought, and it names the afterthought for what it is: a ramp round the back is a failure, not a solution. It teaches the curb-cut effect, that designing for disability helps everyone, because a dropped kerb, a ramp or a lift also serves a parent with a pram, a traveller with a trolley, an older or injured person and, as India's own guidelines observe, a person carrying shopping or wearing a sari; and it frames disability, in the social model, as a mismatch between a person and an environment — the building disables, not the body. Its tools are real and current: the seven principles of universal design from Ronald Mace's group at North Carolina State University, and in India the Harmonised Guidelines and Standards for Universal Accessibility of 2021 and the Accessible India Campaign, with concrete standards such as an accessible ramp no steeper than one in twelve and a minimum clear ramp width of one thousand two hundred millimetres. It teaches wayfinding as a discipline distinct from signage, insisting that more signs are not better wayfinding — a legible building wayfinds itself through sightlines, landmarks and a clear plan hierarchy, you cannot sign your way out of a confusing plan, and signage is the last layer rather than the first. It treats the programme seriously — zoning public from private and served from servant spaces, and resolving circulation — and it champions adaptive re-use on the principle that the greenest building is the one that already exists, working with an existing structure and staging an honest dialogue between old and new that neither fakes heritage nor erases it. And it makes the studio method explicit: a design process that is iterative and non-linear rather than a straight line, representation that runs from a sketch and a photograph to a drawing and a render while remembering that a render persuades and a working drawing instructs, a portfolio that shows thinking rather than only glossy final images, and a critique or viva that tests reasoning rather than taste. Throughout, the studio is treated as the place where a designer learns to serve strangers well, and the comfortable shortcuts are named plainly.