Sustainable Interior Design

The sustainability course, and the one that opens Year 3 by turning a critical, resource-honest lens on everything the programme has taught. It is about indoor environmental quality and green building, and it is unusually blunt, because no design field attracts more greenwashing. Sustainability, it insists, is a measure of PERFORMANCE and resource use, not a style of plants-on-walls and earthy colours, and not a gadget you bolt on: the order that actually matters is the energy hierarchy, which is to REDUCE demand first with passive design, then make what remains EFFICIENT, and only then add renewables, so a solar panel on a hot, unshaded, glass-walled room is greenwashing, not green. It teaches the green rating systems precisely and honestly: India's national GRIHA, developed by TERI with the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy and launched in 2007; IGBC, set up by the CII in 2001 and the most widely used in India; and the American LEED, from the US Green Building Council in 2000 and run in India through the GBCI and IGBC. These are genuinely useful frameworks and market signals, but a certificate is not a guarantee, because points can be chased and a real performance gap means a highly-rated building can use more energy in operation than its design promised. It is careful about the chemistry, too: 'CFC-free' is real ozone progress, because the Montreal Protocol phased out chlorofluorocarbons from 1987, but many CFC-free refrigerants are hydrofluorocarbons with global-warming potentials thousands of times that of carbon dioxide, now being phased down under the 2016 Kigali Amendment, so CFC-free is not the same as climate-safe, just as low-VOC is not zero-VOC. On comfort it corrects the single most expensive habit in Indian interiors: thermal comfort is not one magic temperature but a balance of six factors, air temperature, radiant temperature, humidity, air movement, clothing and activity, and the adaptive-comfort research shows that people in naturally-ventilated spaces are comfortable across a much wider band, so a ceiling fan and light clothing make twenty-nine degrees comfortable and a fixed twenty-two-degree air-conditioning setpoint is needlessly cold and energy-hungry. It separates daylight from solar heat, because the aim is to bring in the light while keeping out the heat and glare through shading, orientation and north light, not to trade one for the other. In water it points out that you do not need drinking-quality potable water to flush a toilet, so non-potable rainwater and recycled greywater, low-flow fixtures and dual plumbing cut demand sharply. And in materials it teaches the waste hierarchy, reduce before reuse before recycle, with recycling as the last resort and 'recyclable' never meaning it will actually be recycled, while insisting that 'natural equals sustainable' is a myth, because embodied carbon and the whole lifecycle decide it, so bamboo shipped across the world or destructively quarried stone can be worse than a local reclaimed material, and the greenest room is usually the one you did not rip out. Throughout, it treats sustainability as measurable performance and honest resource accounting, and it names the folklore as folklore.