Interior Design Studio VI

The capstone comprehensive design studio of the semester, where everything the programme has taught comes together in a full, resolved interior project. It teaches the designer to understand the built environment as a holistic living whole from macro to micro, shaped by geographic, socio-cultural, historic, political and economic forces, and to run a real project from data to detail. It begins with the design programme, the disciplined collection and analysis of data and the breaking of a brief into the components of a design problem, users and activities and site and constraints and budget and code, and it is clear from the start that good design begins with the programme and the problem and not with a form, so that the concept serves the brief. It teaches interior design as the integration of diverse functional concerns, insisting that the designer's real work is not decoration but the resolution of structure, services, code, ergonomics, cost, safety and experience into one coherent whole, and it develops the technical realms that integration demands, construction detailing that makes a design buildable, building codes and life safety and universal accessibility as the discipline within which creativity works, custom-designed furniture and cabinetry chosen when it earns its cost, and specification writing and cost estimating treated as design decisions rather than administration, because a design that cannot be specified or costed is not finished. It teaches the identity and communication of a design, wayfinding planned into a legible plan rather than bolted on as signs, signage and graphic identification, decorative accessories as the completing layer, and rendering by hand and by computer, while insisting that a great render is not a great design and that the render serves the design rather than replacing it. It frames the whole project as a responsibility, treating buildings as major consumers of resources, selecting sustainable materials by their whole life rather than by a green label, and weighing every design choice as a resource choice. And it applies all of this across the advanced building types a professional meets, hospitality and retail and healthcare and office systems, urban interiors such as malls and streets and squares and fairgrounds, transport interiors or interior ports such as airports and stations and boats, exhibition displays, and mobile units such as buses and railway coaches, insisting that no single approach fits every type and that each has its own drivers and users and codes and constraints to be understood deeply, and it is run as one major design developed in full detail and two minor time problems, to build both depth of resolution and breadth of range. Throughout, it aims at the comprehensive designer who can take a real project from a brief to a buildable, code-compliant, costed, responsible and beautifully resolved interior.