Cultivating the Next Generation of Interior Designers: The Undergraduate as Design Researcher

Abstract

ISSUE: To cultivate better designers and design researchers, should undergraduates test their own hypotheses concerning the built environment?

APPLICATION: A third–year undergraduate student developed a research strategy to investigate how furniture placement affects human behavior. Two different furniture arrangements, one existing layout and one layout designed by the student, were used as the experiment's dependent variables.

GOAL: Primary goals for this study were to demonstrate how research could be directly meaningful to the undergraduate educational experience in interior design and to increase understanding of the complexities of mentoring young design researchers.

DESCRIPTION: The student was involved in all aspects of the research project from conceptualization and grant proposal writing to data analysis and presentation of results. The entire process occurred within a five–month period.

CONCLUSION: This research experience provided the student with increased confidence and a broader theoretical background from which to analyze and challenge previously accepted viewpoints held by the design community. To lead the interior design discipline into the next century, young designers should be trained to assess critically and analyze new information and methods.

Summary

As we prepare today’ graduates for leadership roles, we must develop in them the ability for critical thought along with the aesthetic and technical skills stressed in the design studio. Design students, like students in any other discipline, need to know how to define a problem, collect data, draw valid conclusions, and communicate the results. If not taught these skills, the next generation of designers will be unable to distinguish between valid scholarly research and unsubstantiated beliefs. The future of the design discipline will depend on interior designers having the intellectual tools to find that “simple error and to provide an appropriate solution. The undergraduate research project is one method to provide the next generation of designers with the intellectual skills needed to make informed decisions.