Exploring Co-Design Methods: Community Engagement Across Interior Design Curriculum

Abstract

Interior design education has a long tradition of integrating project experiences into courses, providing students with opportunities to engage with community stakeholders to develop design solutions. However, experimentation with how co-design projects can be sequenced within an interior design curriculum has been underexplored. This study intentionally zooms out from singular experiences of co-design projects and instead examines multiple co-design experiences through the lens of co-design methods that are used within a curricular sequence. As such, this study explores the sequencing of co-design experiences and the role of scaffolding types of co-design methods across an interior design curriculum. Through course artifact analysis and interviews with students and stakeholders across three courses, third-year studio, undergraduate multi-level, and advanced senior-level, the study examines how a sequential approach contributes to a systematic co-design curriculum that integrates skill-building across multiple courses. Categorizing methods by role and timing in the co-design process, this research illustrates diverse applications of exploratory, generative, and evaluative approaches across three courses. The findings contextualize methods, including student-facilitated visioning sessions with participatory activities such as sliding scales, image elicitation, space-use mapping, along with technology integration. In addition, this work maps co-design processes to the Council for Interior Design Accreditation (CIDA) Professional Standards related to collaboration, business practices & professionalism, and human-centered design. Further, this study advances a framework for the strategic integration of co-design experiences and methods across an interior design program, suggesting implications for preparing students who can foster empathy and facilitate co-design processes in design practice.