In Design » Designers

Interior Designers’ Professional Competence Today

admin — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 05:29:01 +0000

Individuals and organizations around the globe are in transition from the traditional economy, based solely on tangible products and assets and the physical constraints of space and time, to a new, knowledge-based economy whose foundation is intellectual capital, including human beings and technologies that are willing and able to work anywhere, “24/7/365,” to create a unique body of knowledge for themselves or their organization. This shift is occurring rapidly, and competitive pressure threatens to replace quality with speed. It is imperative, however, that the people who inhabit organizational environments take the time to perform better. Likewise, organizations must build time into the production cycle of knowledge-based products. Only high-quality information will reach the widest possible global audience and, ultimately, have the broadest influence.

Interior designers’ professional competence today, and in the future, depends on their full participation in the information revolution. Designers must consider learning a lifelong enterprise and transform what they know into a deep understanding of the role of the designer—the professional who makes it possible for human beings to accomplish their goals individually and as participants in whatever organization or situation they are part of. The journey will no doubt be difficult, but, in undertaking it, designers will continue to enhance their role and their importance to society.

The Design Industry Has Experienced a Revolution

admin — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:31:02 +0000

Today, interior designers find themselves working quite differently than in the past. Richard Buchanan, head of the department of design at Carnegie Mellon University, goes so far as to suggest that since 1995 the design industry has experienced a revolution. He maintains, in fact, that, like the culture itself, design has evolved to become the “new liberal art of technological culture.”

Traditionally, the liberal arts have comprised the humanities, the social and natural sciences, and mathematics. The liberal arts are distinguished by a set of disciplines such as grammar, logic, and rhetoric that have the ability to create bridges to areas of specialization such as the basic sciences and medicine, which have their own, sometimes arcane, vocabularies.

To design spaces well, interior designers, like anthropologists, must continuously cross back and forth among many different corporate cultures and terrains of knowledge. In this sense, design is a liberal art that connects discrete areas of knowledge to all other elements of the culture. This is increasingly evident in design firms that have moved into strategic planning and other highly specialized areas of the design process. These firms are successful because before they even begin to conceive a design, they study workers in the workplace. The designers in these firms are organizational behaviorists whose solutions reflect the way people actually do their work.

Interior Designers And Furniture Manufacturers

admin — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 01:36:14 +0000

The furniture systems that had been designed in the 1960s and 1970s,though an ideal solution for their time, were not able to address the technologically and physiologically based problems of the new workplace. Now, interior designers were called upon to do no less than integrate furniture, technology, ergonomics, building systems, and the environment. Design professionals not only had to expand their skills and knowledge, they needed to change their work style. Specifically, they had to learn to work quickly and collaboratively with their clients and to see office design from the perspective of every position on the organizational chart.

For a time, the speculative office building and its emphasis on first-time costs
had relegated interior designers and furniture manufacturers to the periphery of the business decision-making loop. The new client–designer collaboration brought designers and manufacturers together for the first time in decades. Designers had gained a deep, fundamental understanding of workplace issues. Manufacturers realized that they could intensify the partnership if they listened to what designers had to say and learned from it. In addition,they could also add the critical component of research to their knowledge base. Manufacturers began behavioral and observational research to study different solutions to workplace problems; that research continues to the present.

That Interior Designers Still find Themselves Dealing

admin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:10:13 +0000

In business, Taylor’s scientific management prevailed, but he had his critics, who were concerned about issues that interior designers still find themselves dealing with a hundred years later. They included Mary Parker Follett of the Harvard Business School,whose humanist, behaviorist approach to the management of organizations represented the opposite side of Taylor’s machinetooled coin.

In the 1910s she championed such far-sighted approaches to work, and the workplace, as “the law of situation” and cross-functional teams. She also insisted that individual workers, rather than being merely static units of work with a prescribed place on a linear assembly line, as Taylor would have it, contributed to the strength of the organization as a whole. She believed that, within the organizational structure, men and women should be free to experiment until they found ways of working that were effective for the tasks at hand and for themselves as individuals.

In the 1920s, Harvard was also the academic home of Elton Mayo and his colleague Fritz Roethlisberger, who are the acknowledged creators of the human relations movement and whose work also has contemporary implications.

They conducted their famous Hawthorne experiments over a period of more than 30 years—from the 1920s to the 1950s—at theWestern Electric Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois.

Designers Who Understand the Big Picture

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:21:46 +0000

project management is often characterized as a success or as a failure only in terms of the final outcome: a project is completed successfully if, when all of the contract obligations are met and the space is in use, the project is on time, on budget, and everyone is happy. In this view, the many different parts and pieces that make up the project as a whole are a problem, and project managers provide value because they have the skill and the knowledge that allows them to treat those parts and pieces as components of the whole project, to hold them all in place and make them work together.

Of course, this view represents an important part of what design professionals need to understand about project management. However, in the eyes of the client, perception often dictates the success of a project, involving a complex set of expectations that needs to be expertly handled. Even so, it is just as important that designers who understand the big picture do not then forget the parts and pieces, and how the project manager must deal with them, sometimes in surprisingly personal ways.

The view of the project manager as a monolith, or an ultimate authority, or as an expert in team dynamics, may in some cases cause more problems than it solves. How do project managers guide if they or the design team as a whole lacks expertise in a certain area?