Uncovering Structures: Making Visible Hidden Biases

The design of interiors, both residential and commercial, has long been tied to social and cultural capital and power (Beecher, 2013). By extension, privilege linked to race, gender, or class has strongly impacted the development of interior design, from the beginning of its professionalization. Despite attempts to expand the reach of the discipline to less privileged groups, many obstacles still prevent both our professional body and the clients we reach to be as diversified as should be. Scholars have started to demonstrate how interior designers have silenced questions of race, gender, and sexual orientation to assert their status in relation to allied disciplines such as architecture (Matthews, Brown, & Brooks, 2021; Matthews & Hill, 2011), and how, both historically and today, interior design and allied disciplines have been structured in ways that diminish or render invisible the contributions of people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer people, or women, despite them being essential to the development of the disciplines (Asojo, 2019; Boris, 2000; Drab, 1998; Kirkham & Walker, 2000; Potvin, 2016; Tauke & Smith, 2020; Teston, 2019; Travis, 2018; Turpin, 2001; Zingoni, 2019). There has been increasingly successful attempts to make visible the work of women in interior design (Dedek, 2022; Martin & Sparke, 2003; Sellers, 2017; Turpin, 2007), often in tandem with similar efforts in architecture—see, for example, the symposia and other programs of the International Archive of Women in Architecture or the wikiD: Women, Wikipedia, Design initiative by ArchiteXX, Parlour and n-ails (see https://www.architexx.org/subtexxt/wikid-women-wikipedia-design) to increase the representation of women designers on Wikipedia—but at the same time, most interior design history books still focus on male architects, highlighting the deeply built gendered foundations that shape the perception of the discipline (Sanders, 2004; Turpin, 2001). Beyond adding names to the canon, how can our design methodologies, publication venues, educational settings, or histories be reframed in ways that foreground the contributions of some groups and encourage close examination of how one’s race, gender, sexual orientation, or ableness impact their experience of the built environment.

When I framed the call, I hoped that submitted articles would help explore questions related to the biases that structure the discipline of interior design. How has access to interior design—as a profession and as a commercial service—been limited or encouraged at different points in time for specific groups of people? How does one’s identities limit full access to the experience or design of interior spaces? How have discourses around race, gender, sexual orientation, or class been used and continue to be used to define and position interior design in relation to allied disciplines? How have educational settings, professional organizations, publication venues, and other structures framing the discipline welcomed or rejected different groups because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or class? How do race, gender, sexual orientation, and class combine in different ways to give or limit access to the profession? Can intersectional understandings of the discipline help rethink what diversity, inclusion, and equity frameworks can bring to interior design and how they have been used up to now? How can an increasingly globalized context help reframe local discussions around inclusion, diversity, and equity in interior design and allied disciplines? I also hoped that contributors might suggest opportunities for structurally changing the profession to foster a more inclusive environment for both designers and users of interior spaces or present innovative approaches to understanding how relations with allied disciplines have contributed to the framing of these structures. How can new technologies or innovative pedagogical methods be used to reframe the history of the discipline? How can they be used to broaden understandings of who is contributing to the design of interior spaces? How can they be used to address past and current structural inequities?

Perhaps not surprisingly, finding such articles proved difficult. Academic institutions, including research journals such as this one, are bound by the same structures that shape the professional disciplines. Just out of the COVID-19 pandemic, a field like interior design where women make up most of the working force cannot escape the unbalanced consequences of the work-from-home environment that was created by lockdowns, as Joanne Crozier’s article in this issue reminds us. The capitalist impulses that support both the interior design profession and the academic system feeding it again structure the knowledge that can be included in journals and other publication venues. For example, the logics of peer-reviewed publications—and especially their importance for academic tenure—deeply impact the type of knowledge that is celebrated or considered as worthy of being shared. Furthermore, the tendency to often look to methods from other fields that foreground “scientific objectivity,” perhaps as a way to circumvent our discipline’s structural insecurities, as Ronn Daniel points out in his article in this issue, certainly sidelines some important research and teaching practices that do not fit well within traditional research frameworks.

I have mostly focused until this point in my introduction on the gendered structures that frame interior design. As the perspective by Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah and article by Ronn Daniel in this issue underline, assumptions about race and physical and cognitive ability also play an important role in the debate around and reception of interior spaces. In both symbolic and physical ways, the consequences of such assumptions harm many users, even if designers did not deliberately aim to do so.

The articles gathered here are not an attempt to point fingers and put the blame on anyone, but rather they seek to bring new lenses to the investigation of interior spaces, to explore paths that could allow us to avoid making similar mistakes in the future. I think we can reasonably say that, even if still far from perfect, the discipline of interior design has in the last decades attempted to at least have some of these discussions (Patel & Sosa Fontaine, 2023). The focus on the physical and social experience of humans has forced us to recognize the importance of the diversity of those experiences. Calls for change by an ever-increasing number of scholars and practitioners are visible in diverse venues, from professional and academic conferences to blogs and academic journals such as this one (see e.g., Hadjiyanni, 2020; Paron, 2020; Pérez Liebergesell et al., 2021).

This special issue thus continues the ongoing discussions occurring in professional associations, firms, universities, and journals, with both polemical and research-based articles underlining the various ways in which our individual and collective biases can limit the transformation of our profession into a truly inclusive one. Two perspectives pieces help position the challenges we face and emphasize the difficulty of identifying solutions to circumvent those barriers. Colin Ripley, Chair of the School of Design at Toronto Metropolitan University, begins with a reflective piece about addressing the questions asked by this special issue, “The Master’s Tools, or, Tearing Down the Goat House from Within,” building on feminist thinker Audre Lorde’s warning from 1979 that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Using both symbolic and concrete examples, Ripley reminds us of the role played historically by concepts of interiority in the context of subjection of dominance. Grappling with the complexities of properly addressing the experience of diverse—and diversely—marginalized groups as a privileged academic himself, Ripley highlights the difficult but necessary work that needs to be done starting from our education environments to stop resisting change and to begin using new tools to challenge power relations inherent to our discipline and our schools. The second perspective offers a similar call with a focus on race. In “Interior Race Theory: Using Interior Objects to Resist Harmful Racial Conditioning,” Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah, mixing experiences and knowledge from her social welfare and interaction design backgrounds, develops an examination of how objects populating interior spaces can create harmful symbolic conditions that limit the potential of interior spaces to serve as restorative environments, when they are not outright impacting people’s well-being.

The discipline of interior design, in parallel to industrial design, took its current form in the twentieth century in large part by embracing research in anthropometry and ergonomics. In recent years, a growing number of scholars have pointed out how the origins of these fields and focus on determining normative bodies have impacts both symbolic (Hosey, 2001) and practical (Hamraie, 2017; Lupton, 2014). In “Measure and Mis-measure: Rethinking Anthropometry in Interior Design,” Ronn Daniel, an Associate Professor of Interior Design at Kent State University, examines how the ergonomic design for a seated computer operator reveals the difficulties faced by designers when relying upon anthropometric data to solve design problems. Thinking about the omnipresence of guides such as Architectural Graphic Standards (which includes anthropometric drawings since 1941), HumanScale (Diffrient et al., 1974/1981) or Human Dimension and Interior Space (Panero & Zelnik, 1979) in interior design and architecture, Daniel makes visible the biases that taint how such ostensibly objective measurements are applied to convey human physical diversity. By stressing how anthropometry emerged from a history of scientists, colonial administrators, eugenicists, and engineers using this work to advance racism, domination, and violence, Daniel questions the impact of continuing to use them in practices that seek to be more inclusive. Using examples taken from articles published in the Journal of Interior Design, Daniel points to the irreconcilable gap between the fixed conditions suggested by ergonomics and anthropometry and the dynamic experience of the built environment, needing to adjust to diverse bodies and changing cultural contexts. His call to reflect on the profession’s overreliance on scientific/technocratic forms of knowledge and open up to other epistemological frameworks certainly resonate with the challenges brought up in the call for this special issue.

The second research article continues Daniel’s challenge to ingrained biases in the tools and assumptions used by design professionals. In “Mothers of Invention: How the Experiences of Women Working from Home During COVID-19 Could Reshape the Domestic Environment,” Joanne Crozier, an interior designer and instructor at British Columbia Institute of Technology, explores how women, both designers and non-designers, actively negotiated the COVID-19 pandemic challenges by adapting and transforming their domestic environments. Crozier examines how the association made between women and domesticity, at the core of traditional conversations around interior spaces, silences much work being done in the domestic sphere. In turn, the reduction of the importance of domestic work impacts how gender roles are considered in work-from-home arrangements. Crozier’s findings, based on questionnaires and interviews, investigate women’s potential to have a say in ideal work-from-home conditions and the strategies they use to navigate imbalance in the gendered distribution of domestic tasks. Crozier’s article also reminds us that major events such as the pandemic brings challenges that are felt differently by different populations, in the experience of interior design, but also in academic production in a profession such as interior design that remains overwhelmingly female. While the article focuses on women, it is important to acknowledge that similar observations could be made about other groups.

The final research article, “Perceptions of Gender in Classrooms and Associated Expectations of Belonging,” comes from a team of researchers from the University of Kansas and from practices Multistudio and Lemay × FLDWRK, Michael C. Ralph, Julia Pascutto, Cheryl Wright, and Rebecca Pedrosa Martínez. Their research explores associations between perceptions of interior spaces as gendered and a sense of belonging, focusing on the design of classrooms. They consider the design of interior environments as having the potential to embody what they name gendered patterns, in reference to sociocultural identities, roles, behaviors, and expressions. As in Crozier’s article, they question differing perceptions between designers and users, using a series of classroom designs that deliberately included gestures traditionally associated with masculine or feminine traits to assess how designers and students perceive them. Like other investigations before, the authors found differences between professionals’ and students’ perceptions, reminding us of the always-present need to make the effort to challenge our biases and to establish strategies to directly assess the needs of the principal users of the spaces we design.

In addition to the articles included, two recently published articles were initially proposed for this issue and help expand the questions explored here. Tina Patel and Andrea Sosa Fontaine’s perspective from the September 2023 issue sought to engage with recent calls for diversity and inclusion in education by exploring if and how interior design educators encourage projects that “challenge past normative methods and engage communities” (p. 160). Amplifying the call made by authors in this issue, Patel and Sosa Fontaine stress that to “emphasize the ethical responsibility of the profession to be inclusive, empathetic, and compassionate,” interior design and education need to move “beyond the paradigm of designing to meet rating systems and antiquated best practices” and instead offer students tools that question the status quo (p. 160). In her “May Morris, Dorothy Walker, and the Legacies of the Arts and Crafts Interior” article from the December 2023 issue, Imogen Hart (2023) brings history and contemporary issues together by examining how house museums offer opportunities to articulate the democratic power of the domestic interior. She importantly argues that exposing and challenging biases can be done through a recognition of both homemaking and preservation as forms of creative labor that challenge traditional histories of interior design, allowing feminist and queer lenses to be included in historical discussions. Those two recent Journal of Interior Design publications accentuate how the topics discussed here are ongoing considerations that will certainly not be limited to this issue.

As a privileged White man teaching in a North American university, I have always felt it was my duty to support and amplify the voices of marginalized and silenced groups, to share their teachings with my students (Vallerand, 2023). This special issue was thus envisioned as another opportunity to do so and the featured texts will, I hope, contribute to the ongoing project of making our discipline more equitable and inclusive. However, my unrealized hope of gathering a larger number of contributors points to the challenges that still face us in realizing this objective. It also reminds us of the burden put on the shoulders of those who speak and write about and against the biases that frame the profession, and of the difficult challenge of pushing for more discussion while acknowledging the limited energy and resources of marginalized communities.