Interior Architecture Commons^™

Meanwhile Interiors, Interiority And Becoming Exterior, Cathy Smith

Interiority

This paper explores the resonances between stakeholder conceptions of 'meanwhile' or transient urban interiors and the notion of interiority as a mobile construct intertwined with wider social and material forces. The focus is on the positioning of these interiors in relation to broader community and neighbourhood agendas, invoking what Jill Stoner describes as a becoming exterior. Although the so-called 'meanwhile use' of vacant or sub-market-condition buildings is an increasingly common tool for activating and managing underused property assets in global cities, much of the existing discourse focuses on policy and placemaking implications rather than design dimensions. Drawing on interviews with …

Design Solutions For Common Problems In Senior Living Facilities, Mary Schmidt

Senior Honors Theses

With the aging population of the United States, the prevalence of dementia rises along with its challenges for individuals in long-term care facilities. As cognitive function deteriorates, dementia patients face growing difficulties in performing daily activities. Common issues such as wayfinding, wandering, exit attempts, agitation, and a generally low quality of life plague most dementia patients at long-term care facilities. Design features can improve quality of life, safety, and coherence for residents with dementia at assisted living facilities. This paper examines existing research to present various design strategies that can enhance daily life for dementia patients in long-term care facilities. …

How Design Depicted In Film Contributes To The Evolution Of Cultural Narratives, Catherine Vanhoose

Interior Design Undergraduate Honors Theses

Interior Design and its trends have had significant influence on pop culture and the general public through the course of human history. Acting as a universal language, design is a tool often used to help communicate ideas. The different interpretations of these ideas are what help to create cultural narratives. This capstone explores the relationships between film and design as creative arts, how they are affected by the current times and trends throughout the history of women, and as a result how women throughout history are influenced by these relationships. Findings provide insight on how interior design is used to …

Storytelling In Interior Design: A Hospitality Case Study Based On Avatar: The Last Airbender, Katelyn Isaacson Bauer

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

Storytelling can function as a crucial element in interior design, offering a powerful means to captivate and engage individuals within a space. The allure of storytelling lies in its ability to evoke emotions, convey messages, and create memorable experiences. Humans are naturally drawn to narratives that transport them to different worlds, evoke nostalgia, or inspire. This fascination with storytelling has led to a notable increase in themed spaces across various industries, from amusement parks and hotels to restaurants and retail spaces. The integration of storytelling into interior design not only enhances the aesthetic appeal of a space but also serves …

Exploring Parametric Concepts And Principles For Furniture And Interior Design, Klawkanlayaphon Sawatmongkhonkul, Eakachat Joneurairatana, Veerawat Sirivesmas

Interiority

This research explores the incorporation of parametric models into the algorithmic design process, specifically focusing on furniture and interior design. It presents a case of an experimental equation centred around a waffle honeycomb structure. The first part of the article reviews three decades of literature on parametric design, which comprises its background, history, theory, and essential concepts and applications. The second part investigates the parametric design process to uncover its potential for interior design applications. The combination of parametric equations with algorithms through the utilisation of multiple steps, such as conditional loops, efficiently designs intricate systems. An intricate system in …

Biophilia: Developing A Taste For Care, Che'leah Shannon

Theses and Dissertations

People in materially developed cultures spend over 90% of their lives in buildings (Evans & McCoy, 1998). Commencing with the industrial revolution these materially developed cultures see most of their populus moving from the countryside to the city in search of work and better lives. The city, an urban and modern development of densely packed peoples, buildings, and infrastructure, has developed as an efficient solution to meet the needs of a cosmopolis.

The city has developed widely without a necessity or place for nature. The ground outside is paved with concrete, efficient and comfortable for travel, buildings are built high …

The Emergence Of Interior Architecture, Maryam Darbandi, Nadieh Imani, Mohammadreza Rahimzadeh

Interiority

Less than a century has passed since the creation or at least the use of the term interior architecture. Although interior architecture had existed before and was considered an inseparable part of architectural work, some developments and changes became the basis for the formation of interior architecture and, as a result, its appearance independently of architecture. The main impact of these developments in the independence of interior architecture can be traced to the 19th and 20th centuries when the field of two specialisations of the same family, interior decoration and interior design emerged. This article aims to take a …

Architecture And Harm Reduction : An Unconventional Approach To Detox, Anna Studdard

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Harm reduction is a principle that stems from countries like Denmark and Switzerland, that implements strategies to encourage safer drug usage, abstinence, and education for users. The National Harm Reduction Coalition implements nationwide programs for substance abusers, such as Syringe Service Programs, rehabilitation programs, detox programs, housing programs, drug testing facilities, services assisting sex workers, and administering Narcan for overdoses, to try to minimize some of the tragedies accompanying substance abuse. The counterpoint opinion of some countries or states is that providing services like needle exchanges and testing centers are encouraging drug usage and doing more harm than good. However, …

Seeking Identity In The Built Environment The Impact Of Latinx Culture Centers On College Campuses, Nancy Munoz

Capstone Projects

When students move to college for the first time, they are faced with challenges of adjustment and acclimating to a new environment. For Latinx students, these challenges are amplified. Many Latinx students are first-generation college students, meaning neither of their parents attended or obtained a bachelor’s degree from a four-year institution. This causes a ripple in the experiences these students face as they were given little guidance on how to navigate college.

They are leaving behind a culture they shared with friends and family. This culture is full of cuisines, music, and cultural traditions. For many this is the first …

Patient Centered, Kiara Bartlett

Capstone Projects

It is inevitable to adapt uneasy feelings leading up to and during a doctor's appointment. The question is why do humans feel this? Research indicates that many medical offices and appointment spaces are designed for employee efficiency, rather that patient experience. This sheds light on the fact that there is a disconnect between provider needs and patient needs in this important, shared space.

Regardless of the type of offices, from general practice to dermatology, every physician office and appointment space have common spatial and operation needs. All healthcare offices need the same type of circulation that creates ease while moving …

Connections Through Contrast The Built Environment Embracing Art Exhibition, Josilyn Welch

Capstone Projects

An emotionally immersive experience within a museum setting can foster feelings of belonging, engagement, exploration, understanding and connection. Providing an environment where empathetic immersion can be achieved through physical, psychological, and social enablers lead to transformative experiences for the visitor. To promote physical, psychological, and social enablers within the museum setting to promote empathetic immersion within its visitors, this museum will consider the following strategies:

Physical Enablers: The museum space will address physical enablers by including environmental features such as diverse opportunities for seating, immersive lighting techniques, and curated finish selections for individual exhibit spaces as well as interactive displays …

Adhd In College Students, Bailey Flaherty

Capstone Projects

College can be an exciting time in life however for many the experience can be tarnished by lack luster living conditions that amplify the negative effects on mental disorders. College is a demanding environment; for students with ADHD (Attention deficit hyper activity disorder), it is even more challenging. For people with this neuro-development disorder, executive brain functions may override healthy or effective processes that would help people to perceive time, focus, manage multiple tasks, and organize students are expected to manage school, work, a social life, chores, and more all while living alone

for the first time in most of …

Illusion: Immersive Experience, Tessa S. Trowbridge

Theses and Dissertations

Can society learn from art, and if so, what type of knowledge can be gained from art? It is currently understood that art and design can help humans explore, discover, and understand philosophical and imaginative topics. There is a general agreement that art can create insight and awareness in ways that logical and rational statements cannot, and from these unique interactions, humans can see the world with a new perspective (Worth, n.d.). This thesis will investigate the claim that art can inspire human imagination and allow viewers to gain insight into a surreal reality using designed, physically immersive spaces.

Immersive …

From Silence To Forte: Developing An Inclusive Space For Persian Musicians To Flourish, Sholeh Salimi

Theses and Dissertations

Music serves as a reflection of culture and conveys various emotional and intellectual states, such as a nation's perspective, social attitudes, and historical background. However, the Iranian revolution in 1979 led to the ban of music by the new regime, limiting the output and audience for Iranian music. In addition, the emergence of Western music accessibility through technology posed challenges for traditional Persian music, and the government's restrictions on music further compounded the problem. To support and advance the preservation and dissemination of Iranian music, this study aims to explore how an interior designer can create a space that enables …

Genius Loci: Capturing The Distinctive Roman Spirit Through Pochoir, Carlee Mcguire

Interior Design Undergraduate Honors Theses

This capstone explores the concept of genius loci through photographic and artistic exploration and does so through a lens of study set on Rome, Italy. The first major goal of the process has been to discover the elements, moments, physical textures, and other design elements that comprise the genius loci of a city or space. The second goal has been to partake in a process that can be used by myself and other designers in efforts to make more conscious design decisions — gaining a better understanding of ‘sense of place’ can assist designers in straying from globalized, placeless design.

Towards Responsive Interiors: Practicing Neuroscience-Informed Design Approaches In Interior Design Education, Eva Storgaard, Marjan Michels, Inge Somers

Interiority

Growing insights from neuroscience—here, understood as an umbrella term for a number of empirical disciplines that study the relation brain, nervous system, genes, and behaviour—and its inquiries into how human behaviour and well-being is affected by interiors can enrich and inform the design of interiors and its properties innovatively. Interior design education can play a key role in linking the insights stemming from research and turn the question of human, experiential responsiveness into an elementary perspective of the design process.

In this paper, we explain a pedagogical method developed for one of our graduate studios that addresses this issue and …

Out From Under: Wellness Design And Alternative Therapies For Anxiety And Depression, Emily J. Adams

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores a facility that combines wellness design strategies with alternative therapies that are not commonly available in the U.S., with the goal of supporting adults with anxiety and/or depression who are not comfortable seeking traditional care.

Flourish: Exploring Healing Environments In A Residential Treatment Setting, Emily D. Kalafian

Theses and Dissertations

The following project explores the ways in which our environments promote healing and support recovery through the design of a residential center for eating disorder recovery. The center will serve 8-10 young women as they seek recovery from restrictive forms of eating disorders. The center will accommodate the necessary staff personnel as well as spaces for supporting activities and wraparound services. The project intends to create a place for healing that feels safe, warm, and considers patients’ needs for autonomy, dignity, and a sense of control amidst disorder. This is a place to create meaningful relationships and to participate in …

Designed For The Camera: Irish Interior Makeover Television 1996–2014, Neville Knott

Dissertations

This thesis examines how television makeover programmes, broadcast in Ireland between 1996 and 2014, mediate the professional practice of interior design. It argues that the programme-makers, in seeking to engage viewers, used a series of strategies—notably the suppression of professional and educational knowledge about interior design—to convey an image of staged coherence that was arrived at unproblematically. In that process, it will be argued, interior design knowledge got lost, and entertainment triumphed. Focusing on these strategies, the thesis considers how the production process used interior design, nonetheless, to attract an audience and generate ratings, focusing on the relationship between amateurs …

Virtual Interiorities, Adam Nash, Kate Geck, Andy Miller

Interiority

A practice of the virtual offers to interior design a dynamic conception of interiority that transcends simplistic representative notions of space, recognising the inseparable relationship of space and time, as well as an understanding of interiority as lived experience and its attendant amenability to active interpretation and therefore design. Ultimately, a practice of the virtual facilitates an understanding of interior as a dynamic and ongoing network of relations, and interior design as individuating participation in this network. In this article, we describe in detail an expanded notion of the virtual, and extrapolate how an understanding of this notion might help …

Floating Home: An Imagined Community, Carrie Collier

Theses and Dissertations

Climate experts around the world agree that anthropogenic climate change threatens the long-term survival of the human species. Human activity has already contributed to an exponential spike in the rate of extinction among other Earthly species, beginning at the time of the industrial revolution.

The American home is a site of concentrated resource consumption, waste production, and greenhouse gas emission. It is also a site where gender-based expectations continue to burden women with a majority share of uncompensated, under-valued domestic labor. Collective or communal housing arrangements could reduce per capita carbon output while facilitating the equitable re-distribution of work that …

The Algorithmic Mashrabiya: Reimagining The Traditional Islamic Screen, Ahmed Nour

Theses and Dissertations

Traditionally, a mashrabiya was an ornate wooden structure attached to the side of an Arabian building or house, with small, intricately patterned openings to provide both ventilation and privacy for the people inside. The patterns, following the geometric rules of Islamic ornament, lent a distinctive appearance to buildings in the region. A mashrabiya converted the house into a safe, private sanctuary, providing a magical scene inside, characterized by linear sun rays, filtered points of light and shadow. Over time, as building technology changed and the number of skilled craftsmen dwindled, the traditional mashrabiya has all but vanished. The aim of …

Privacy In Multigenerational Homes Before And Amidst Covid-19, Jennifer Luque

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Multigenerational households in the United States are more prevalent now than they have been in the last forty years. In part, aging, illness, job loss, saving money, and even tradition are factors that contribute to the idea of multiple generations living together in one home. Given the health of the individuals, size of the home, and number of dedicated bedrooms and bathrooms, living multigenerational can have both positive and adverse effects. Many family groups fall into the category of multigenerational living. However, this study investigates the relationships between adults and senior family members in terms of privacy in the home. …

Interior Design Teaching Methodology During The Global Covid-19 Pandemic, Lina Ahmad, Marco Sosa, Karim Musfy

Interiority

In March 2020, the World Health Organization officially announced the COVID-19 outbreak as a global Pandemic (WHO, 2020). During this time, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) introduced national preventative measures to slow the spread of the deadly virus by announcing the closure of schools and higher education institutions, and the commitment of online learning. Teaching faculty at the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises (CACE) at Zayed University were suddenly facing the challenge of teaching design through a distance learning approach. As educators of interior design, the authors were part of the team tasked to find ways to teach design …

Too Much ‘Stuff’ And The Wrong Space: A Conceptual Framework Of Material Possessions, Elena Marco, Katie Williams, Sonya Oliveira

Interiority

Space for living in new build houses in the UK is at premium and households have more stuff than ever before. The way this stuff is accommodated in dwellings can significantly affect residents’ quality of life and well-being. This paper presents a new conceptualisation of material possessions that could be of use to those involved in housing design. Three universal characteristics of material possessions; value, temporality and visibility are used to identify the space in the home that possessions might require. A conceptual framework that integrates these characteristics with spatial information about the interior of the home is developed. The …

Testing Reliability Of Biophilic Design Matrix Within Urban Residential Playrooms, Ellen Marte

Theses and Dissertations

Biophilic interior design in urban playrooms has been greatly understudied. We measured inter-rater reliability of the Biophilic Interior Design Matrix (BID-M) and matrix items by quantitatively coding images of 45 New York City residential playrooms. Findings suggest that the BID-M needs to be modified to better assess urban playrooms.

Encapsulating Educational Design For Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Lauren Praeuner

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

This paper is a thesis/creative project hybrid split into two parts. First, it examines different aspects of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the symptoms experienced by those on the spectrum, and the guidelines that parents, medical professionals, and educators should follow to ensure a holistic approach to the care and education of children with autism. The text also notes some of the considerations that designers should review when designing educational facilities for these individuals, as well as few precedents that successfully do so. The second part of the paper presents my team’s architectural studio project, contributed to by UNL students Lindsay …

Urban Interiority In The Anthropocene, Nerea Feliz Arrizabalaga

Interiority

This paper explores how interior design could amplify the current discourse on sustainability within urban public space. The consideration of a number of contemporary authors that are questioning the traditional notion of interiority situates this paper within an expansive understanding of interiority in the context of the Anthropocene. Interiority is considered as a transferable condition based on modes of interior occupation, that can take place on the outdoors, and is often found in public spaces within dense urban areas. In the face of an upcoming biodiversity crisis, this text advocates for a necessary disciplinary shift away from traditional anthropocentric views, …

Hidden Gem: Realizing The Value Of Community In Healthcare Environments, Nicole Lee

Theses and Dissertations

Holistic approaches in healthcare address a problem from its root causes. The American healthcare model – both its treatment and distribution methods – is among the many issues that divides the nation. We have found ourselves with millions of uninsured people among a growing population where chronic illness is on the rise among adults and children, especially within low-income demographics (Goodman & Conway, 2016). Though this is a widespread epidemic, only recently has there been any effort to question and reform traditional healthcare.

The way that wellness is assessed in America has been detrimental to patient outcomes …

Design Hub: Activating Community By Design, Ed Williams

Theses and Dissertations

MOTIVATION

At the turn of the century, Robert Putnam (2000, 27) wrote “...a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current.” Putnam is describing a loss of “social capital” throughout American society. Research suggests that many of our contemporary issues are the result of a decline in “social capital,” or “community.”

This pervasive lack of community is thought to be detrimental to “educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health …