Author: Lewis Bauer

Interior design colleges face the same challenges as other art disciplines – the jump from school to real life where the desires of the customer and a strict budget can constrain even the most creative designers.

As one school showed however, getting students ready for these real life scenarios can lead to some pretty exciting (and fun) competitions where the sky is the limit and the budget is outrageous.

A contest designed by an instructor at a Chicago interior design college recently awarded students $2,000 for designing a penthouse suite. The interior designs weren’t for a real customer, but the students were given the chance to design the suite based on a lavish, $30 million budget.

Harrington College of Design instructor Constantine Vasilios challenged students to design the penthouse for the fictitious client according to the client’s own lifestyle and tastes. The imaginary penthouse had 14,000 square feet of floor space and the only limits were the budget and the imagination of the students who had to choose the lifestyle of their clients.

The interior design college student that won the first prize created more than 30 unique spaces, including an outdoor patio area, game room, arcade, and four bedrooms for the penthouse suite. There were three finalists in all that won the $2,000 prize.

While the multi-million dollar budget may seem like a vast amount of funding making it easy to create a limitless design, the project was really about how to make sure a design project comes in under budget. As far as penthouse apartments go, thirty million isn’t that much of a budget.

On the Harrington College of Design website, Vasilios said “Money is something we don’t always talk about in academia and the first component that students face upon graduation. Solving creatively within a budget is of paramount importance in real-world scenarios.”

Once a year, top interior design firms and hiring companies are asked to name the architectural and interior design schools that they feel are best preparing students to enter the work force by industry publication Design Intelligence.

Florida State University’s interior design program ranked 10^th on the Design Intelligence’s 13^th annual report of America’s Best Architecture and Design Schools and earned one other distinct honor that is rare for an interior design school.

FSU is notorious in the education industry for many reasons, its interior design program aside. It is probably best known for being one of Florida’s flagship colleges; its two-thousand graduates each year, and its national ranking for programs stretching medicine, law, science, and the arts. It is also one of the ten percent of American schools to earn a chapter in the National Academic Honor Society.

In addition to Design Intelligence’s list of best design schools, they also named the year’s Most Admired Educators; a list of only 25 teachers in the country who have the distinguished honor of making this list. Only five of the 25 names on the list are interior design instructors and FSU’s Lisa Waxman made the cut. Many aren’t surprised by the dual honors to the interior design school, considering the extensive awards the students and faculties accumulate each year.

In a report from FSU’s Libby Fairhurst, Lisa Waxman said that being the best comes by being responsive and on-time with today’s interior design issues. ““We strive to develop designers who are responsive to human needs, who hold the world’s natural resources in high regard, and who design functional as well as beautiful spaces that improve the quality of life,” the interior design school instructor said.

Design Intelligence has rated graphic arts, architectural, and interior design schools among others for more than a decade and is an important publication for casting applicable comparisons between education systems and the needs of the design industry.

The Council for Interior Design Accreditation (CIDA), the organization responsible for accrediting some of the interior design schools in the country, recently announced a change in the way it talks about some of its policies.

This change is the result of discussion between interior design schools and other interested parties regarding the potential for erroneous assumptions by those investigating an interior design school’s accreditation because of some of CIDA’s documents.

The parties discussed with the agency the potentially negative perspective that some students and parents might have of certain schools because of the wording used in CIDA’s Confidentiality and Disclosure statements as well as its Program Announcement and Disclosure of Accredited Status document.

The primary concerns were three-parts of the documents that made statements about the interior design school accreditation process and the need for visit to the schools by CIDA representatives.  The organization agreed that some parents and students may not fully understand the terms used in the accreditation process and mistake terms to mean something less than positive about the schools.

The parties worried about the publishing of interior design school compliance standards, which could somehow create an unintentional ranking of the schools. CIDA’s press release did not provide detail into which texts were considered risky or how their reports could unintentionally rank the interior design schools involved. CIDA decided to publish more information to clarify this information rather than refrain from publishing it all together though they did concede to not mention any interior design school by name.

The documents also mentioned a required physical visit to certain interior design schools, which some concerned parties viewed as incriminating. The language implied that some schools were fully accredited, while others were not. CIDA says that the organization’s representatives decided to make changes after “careful consideration of stakeholders’ comments and concerns”, but ultimately voted to also disclose any interior design school that is denied for accreditation as well.

An interior design school program might be a tool employed to help a local high school with a design project soon.

Students from the interior design program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have submitted a design proposal meant to overhaul the common area at Crete High School in Saline County.

Interior design schools, and any art program at a respectable institution, may be called on to assist the community in this manner. Programs from interior design to graphic design are a great resource for finding free or discounted works thanks to students who need to gain real-world experience. This is valuable endeavor for the high school and UNL, both for the schools and the students.

Students at the high school are driving the changes and are in charge of coordinating the consultations and focusing on the needs of the students. They are working closely with the UNL interior design team to discuss the potential improvements that can be made in these areas at the high school. In this type of relationship, both sets of students learn important lessons about the real-world of negotiation.

Back at UNL, interior design teams of two or three students are working together to propose different solutions for the commons area, which the high school would like to see updated to a more contemporary style. Crete High School already has an area set aside for juniors and seniors to sit in the auditorium where they should be able to work on assignments or projects together. The interior design groups have just a couple of weeks to submit their redesign ideas to their teacher for review.

According to the news report from Crete News, the high school’s assistant principal, Jim Moore says that this is an important area at their school “These areas are places where students should feel comfortable and work together. The school is literally open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. most days for our students and their activities,” he said.