Journal of Interior Design最新文献

The story of idleness in interiors is one of contradictions and unresolved tensions. This article reflects on the idle/leisurely body in architectural interiors over time. Gender, class, and racial stereotypes overlay Western masculinist ideals coloring the meaning and perception of the word “idleness.” Nineteenth and early twentieth-century Western artists produced a wealth of artwork, which displayed female bodies in repose. Symptomatically, these male artists titled their works “idle hours,” “la perezosa” (lazy), or “dolce-far-niente” (sweetness of doing nothing). Like a “canapé,” both an appetizer and the rival word to sofa in many languages, these female bodies were gently placed on divans or confortables. Yet, the connection between bodily comfort and immorality was established centuries earlier. Scholars of colonialism and Orientalism comment on how idleness and laziness were often presented as a character attribute befitting non-Western bodies, particularly Muslims. However, they fail to explain the reasons for this positioning. This article argues that the long-standing implications of the idle body have had a profound effect on how the Western gaze reads Oriental spaces and the bodies contained within them. Furthermore, it is no accident that the East was feminized within the dichotomy of the Occident and the Orient. Western female bodies were confined in domestic interiors due to their biologically assigned role as mothers; making female idleness in the West almost as inevitable as the perception of the idleness of the Oriental.

In the wake of a turning tide on the legalization of medicinal and recreational marijuana, and with the recent decriminalization of psilocybin in Denver, a psychedelic renaissance may too be on the horizon. Psychedelics have again become the subject of rigorous study at institutions such as Yale, UCLA, NYU, and Johns Hopkins. Many clinical accounts underscore the psychedelic experience with a “dissolution of the self” as an entity separate from the universe, producing a subjective–objective duality. By delving into clinical accounts of altered states of consciousness, this paper will identify potential “psychedelic strategies” which suggest alternative modes of translation and representation of the human body in relation to interior space, integrating the self with the built and natural environment, ultimately offering designers powerful tools to generate more socially, politically, and environmentally conscious interior futures, perhaps an alternate phenomenology of the interior.

Prevailing conceptions of disability in architectural discourse give rise to the devaluing of disabled people's lived experiences. However, several studies in architecture and disability studies show how disability experience may lead to a careful attentiveness toward the qualities of the built environment that are relevant for design. Using focused ethnography, we examine how architect William Feuerman's disruptive vision impairment restructured his attention. The insights gained from his experience were incorporated conceptually into his design practice, and the resulting design principles were realized in one of his office's projects—Urban Chandelier, a design intervention positioned in an urban installation. Feuerman's experiences encouraged him to deliberately introduce disruption into his design, aiming not to disable everyone, but to make passers-by attentive to their surroundings. He re-organizes people's modes of attention through the distinct visual qualities of architecture, generating new meaning, in a similar manner as the stroke that affected his attention. We conclude that considering disabled people's lived experiences demonstrates potential in designing artifacts experientially interesting for a broad population, including but not limited to disabled people.

Public spaces do not exist without the presence of bodies. Mediation repositions bodies in space in relation to one another. Existing scholarship has focused on these effects in spaces of civic action, but everyday publics are less understood. This analysis of two recently completed public interiors at Hudson Yards in New York City examines the interplay of spaces, bodies, and images and the impact to the public space produced. Snarkpark (“a new age retail environment”) and Vessel (“a new public landmark”) were popular destinations in Hudson Yards, as documented by their Instagram feeds. A visit to either project involved the co-presence of strangers (a condition sociologist Lyn Lofland refers to as the public realm) but in their role as back-drops what resulted was primarily a disembodied, mediated communality. Instagram posts consisted primarily of photographs taken by visitors, selfies minimizing the presence of other visitors. These images posted to social media do not merely form an alternative to physical public space but transform it as well.

The critique in design education is founded on philosophical traditions that have remained embedded in pedagogical practices as a mode for assessing and developing students' ability to communicate processes and ideas. Research, however, indicates that the traditional critique may not always be effective at aligning with or supporting contemporary learning and professional practice. As a discipline, interior design is inherently related to and reliant on interpersonal relationships, collaboration, communication, and empathy, all of which require cognitive skills along with inclusion of the affective domain. While the term “affect” is typically associated with emotional reaction in absence of reason, as a taxonomy of learning it involves social and emotional development through levels of “receiving,” “responding,” “valuing,” “organizing,” and “characterizing.” Building on research related to design critiques and diverse disciplinary perspectives on peer review, we investigated the affective domain of learning as a framework to reconceive critique pedagogies and practices in a fourth-year (40 students) and a first-year (35 students) interior design studio. As a generative and constructive process to engender dynamic conversation as well as active engagement, results revealed enhanced and effective learning outcomes as well as higher levels of skills and attributes essential for active, critical, and engaged professionals. The process also exposed implications for future research and exploration.

The interior frequently masquerades a resistance to being clean, often demonstrating different levels of hygiene, containment, and control. Yet, it is the-body-inside that simultaneously resists and distributes infection within the mineral contexts of the building. Ever since Van Leeuwenhoek's (1993) discovery of a strange microbial world of bacteria and protozoa, societal, bodily, and spatial interpretations of clean have shifted. Evolving levels of cleanliness continually reposition the interior to become progressively more visually hygienic and meticulously super-clean. While medical need often leads and intensifies infection control, it is personal fastidiousness, compulsion, and media image that shape human attitudes and cultures to grime and dirt. Historically, “homes-of-the-future” reinforce a technologically sanitized prototype, a strain of which persists in the sterility of the ordered “show-home.” Each avoids the pathogenic realities of the-body-inside revealing esthetic traces of the Modernist ideals of clean lines and clean living that recur in contemporary images of minimal occupation. As we move to develop new hyper-clean and locked-down pandemic-proof interiors capable of immunizing and shielding occupants, this paper re-evaluates what it means to be clean and how the interior helps to resist and mediate these efforts. As concerns over antimicrobial resistance and interior touching increases, our protection from allergy, disease, and contagion are changing. The interior is increasingly playing a critical role in arbitrating biological infection, either through intelligent cleaning systems, infrastructure, or material science. This paper sets out the existing resistance to, and the conditions for, a new clean interior and posits where and what the future might conceive, including the advancement of immunology by reintroducing “dirt” back into interiors (mirroring Edward Jenner's deliberate infection of humans to develop resistance to smallpox) enabling better biological resistant to the outside world.

Eye movements are highly dependent on the task and stimuli given to a viewer. If no tasks are specified, do individuals see the item or scene in the same way? How are one's spatial ability and creative performance in spatial design related to visual attention when looking at various visual aspects of an environment scene? This exploratory case study aimed at understanding individuals' visual attentional pattern when looking at three-dimensional environment scenes with spatially relevant or decorative elements and its potential link with spatial ability and creative performance, using eye-tracking technology. Thirty-eight interior design students at a Midwestern university participated in the study. Three results emerged. First, visual engagement with spatially relevant elements in an environment scene was typically stronger with the high spatial ability group. Second, although the statistical evidence was not strong, regardless of the location of the decorative visual stimuli, the high spatial ability group tended to pay more attention to spatial components than the low spatial ability group; whereas the low spatial ability group seemed to be more attracted to decorative visual stimuli. Third, in a few images, an individual's tendency to view certain aspects was found to negatively or positively correlate with creative performance. The study represents the initial step in understanding an individual's visual attention to spatial elements in environment scenes and its potential correlation with spatial ability and creative performance in spatial design.

Given the growing recognition of design's influence on a range of performative outcomes, interior designers stand to capitalize on new opportunities—if they adeptly respond to new responsibilities. These responsibilities often begin by formulating well-defined problems, which, in turn, serve as the basis for informed-design solutions. However, the extent to which commercial interior designers offer informed-design services has yet to be identified. This study sought to understand the knowledge acquisition and knowledge application practices of commercial interior designers during the project-defining phases of the design process. It investigated these tactics by first identifying designers' perceptions of their clients' priorities and then comparing the delivery of informed-design services across contextual factors and individual characteristics. Finally, the study examined the communication processes involved in providing these services. Survey results from 165 commercial interior designers suggest that the provision of informed-design services is influenced by client priorities, market sector, and firm characteristics. Differences were also revealed among individual factors of professional preparation, title, and experience level, with senior-level staff more inclined to perform informed-design services. Moreover, while designers seemingly value services that employ dynamic, diachronic communication processes, they most often perform those involving two-way communication. Findings point to disparities between the most frequently provided services and those designers perceive to offer the most project insight. Taken together, results suggest that designers value a range of voices, but may not always invite these voices to the table.

This paper proposes an understanding of the human body as a plural object. Drawing on the ideas of Bennet, Merleau-Ponty, and Wilson, it envisions the body as a complex ecology in which the human biome, the billions of microbial communities that symbiotically live within our bodies, act as a dynamic system of flows and feedbacks within its environments. This body's spatial experiences are not fixed and static, but continuous, fluid, and permeable, in search of novel experiences and homeostasis. By re-imagining what it means to occupy space, we can re-experience our lives as intimately interwoven with the natural world, catalyzing new biophilia, as our body-ecology seeks contentment with “interiors” outside of itself, at home in a dynamic planetary biosphere.