The Future in Interior Design
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Abstract
It’s exciting for me to be at an IDEC Conference. It’s thrilling to see many young teachers even though you make me feel old. And being among “old timers” is a nice reunion with persons I’ve worked with on many important projects. When we had finished our work on those projects, in founding NCIDQ and FIDER and completed consolidation to establish ASID, it seemed that we stood at the threshold of permanence even greatness as a profession. Now I’m uncertain that we’ve crossed the threshold. I guess I was inclined to believe predictions which turned out to be mere optimism. One likes to believe that our organizations will have strength and influence. And I, at least, pay some attention to dreamers. There is an appeal about pictures of clean, gleaming, curvilinear cities with trains gliding on a shining monorail above green parks, inhabited by beaming citizens. Those cities remain a project for the future. There is, in Florida, the house Xanadu, which pretends to be futuristic, but appears to be mere gadgetry. So I see that not much has really changed during fifteen years. The absence of any notable change in design for habitation raises questions that we have done all that ought to be done to shape our professional destiny. It may be that design education needs some revisions. Perhaps the practitioners consider the professional organizations as a certification instead of a project. Maybe we haven’t realized that destinies are designed and not decreed by fate. Here at “The Gateway to the Future,” I want to touch briejy on some considerations about topics which have become apparent to me during years of practice. IDEC has a great stake and a great responsibility for the future and its members are esteemed for being the source of the future practice. I hope you will be open and thoughtful about my perceptions. for I consider design as a potentially creative act which we are capable of practicing and teaching. Recently I read somewhere that predictions are easy so long as they don’t concern the future. I’ll be safe and make no predictions and I will, instead, outline some programs and discussion topics. Right off, it might be good to be reminded that the images we have of ourselves and our future selves are what the future will be like. And we should realize that ours is less a future of what we do than what we think. Where will we invest our energies and time? What will be our projects? The great shortcoming for us is that we have no challenges. There is nothing that we might do which won’t be done by others. The ordinary work of our profession is often trivialized and we’ve not been persuasive that we can do it better. Lack of challenge is, fortunately, balanced by a set of opportunities. If we recognize and grasp those, our projects will be clear, and we can talk about such opportunities for awhile. I believe the encompassing opportunity and project is to understand our profession in relation to art, architecture and society better than we do now. Before we talk about those things, however, I want to mention an approach to the future outlined by Congressman Bob Edgar at last year’s conference of the World Future Society. According to him, we must, first, monitor the future; second, market our future and then manage our future. The first step, monitoring the future, is merely time consuming. This is often called the information society and certainly there are volumes of data to be examined and absorbed where there may be lessons for us. It’s a necessary step because understanding the present is the only preparation we can make to bring the future into focus. There is little serious writing about interior design, but there is scholarship in art, architecture, anthropology, etc., in which understandings become, in the consciousness of the designer, a lesson to produce controlled and creative design that challenges the imagination and offers emotional rewards regardless of its pragmatic duty. Often there will be a fragment of information related to a question about design. It’s laborious to read and read and yet, that’s our responsibility, for if we’re to be creative, we must borrow from the visions of all men. Courbousier described creativity as a “patient search.” He meant that design is many bodies of knowledge and understanding. It’s scientific, technical, social, political, artistic, symbolic, but it is not any single one of these, and is not completely described by all of them. They just help us do it; in understanding the necessary mental process. Congressman Edgar’s second rule was to market the future issues. We’re aware that vast segments of our society are sustained by fragments of information provided by television news programs and other summary forms. It is clear that a message cannot easily be transmitted. Yet, there must be a message about some value which a conscientious designer can provide. It is my belief that the very worst form of message representing our production is all the pretty pictures in slick magazines which pretend creativity is in evi-