Interior Design

AfterTaste: Expanded Practices in Interior Design is an edited volume comprising texts, interviews and portfolios that collectively document new theories and emerging critical practices in the field of interior design. The material is informed by, but not limited to, the annual AfterTaste symposia hosted by Parsons The New School of Design. The central argument of the book is that the field of interior design is inadequately served by its historical reliance on taste-making and taste-makers, and, more recently from a set of theoretical concerns derived from architecture; the volume seeks to set an expanded frame by advancing new voices and perspectives in both the theory and practice of interior design, considered as an independent discipline.

https://www.dastu.polimi.it/post-pandemic-interiors/  /// 
Transformations of home and work interiors in relation to the pandemic era | Pandemic Interiors is a Research Group at DAStU, Politecnico di Milano | See references on: https://www.researchgate.net/project/Pandemic-Interiors |  The project investigates spatial, social and cultural impacts of the pandemic Covid-19 on living and working spaces. The effects of the health crisis have accelerated a social evolution that has been underway for some time, showing the limits of urban structures and spatial organizations together with the difficulty of adapting them to the transformation processes underway. The metamorphosis of the family, the decline in the number of children and the ageing population, the migration, the work crisis and impoverishment, the pervasiveness of information technologies often highlight the limits of the current living and working realities of many western societies. The research aims to find new or alternative models for domestic and working environments.
See our Project’s references on https://www.researchgate.net/project/Pandemic-Interiors

(Interior Talk by Inclusive Interiors Research Group) Nelle lunghe settimane di quarantena la casa è diventata l’oggetto più discusso, osservato, trasformato, in certi momenti amato, ma anche odiato. Da custode dell’intimità, luogo in cui rifugiarsi, essa ha ospitato comunità intime, socialità virtuali, sessioni di lavoro, ricerca di benessere e necessità di cura. Non solo: alla casa è stato chiesto un adattamento e una trasformabilità come mai fino a ora. Covid-Home si interroga su alcuni temi chiave che ruotano attorno al progetto dell’abitare, alla sua costruzione anche fisica, alle ripercussioni sulla città, fino al ruolo del design inteso come pratica di abitabilità di uno spazio. Le riflessioni coinvolgeranno in modo trasversale studiosi, architetti, curatori, costruttori e designers, che con sguardi diversi proveranno, a partire dall’odierna crisi sanitaria, a immaginare possibili scenari sull’abitare del futuro.
// During the long weeks of quarantine, the house has become the most discussed, observed, transformed, sometimes loved, but also hated object. As a guardian of intimacy, a place to take refuge, it has hosted intimate communities, virtual socialites, work sessions, the search for well-being and the need for care. Not only: the house has asked to adapt and transform as never before. "Covid-Home Talk" questions some key issues that revolve around the design of living, its construction, including physical development, the repercussions on the city, up to the role of design as a practice of living space. The reflections will involve scholars, architects, curators, builders and designers in a transversal way, who will try, with different looks from today's health crisis to imagine possible scenarios on the living of the future.


Con//With: Imma Forino/Marcante Testa; Jacopo Leveratto/Giordana Ferri; Michela Bassanelli/Stefano Mirti; Pierluigi Salvadeo/Stefano Spremberg; Marco Borsotti/Marco Ferreri.

This work aims to analyze current trends in the interior design of shopping malls. These trends have been detected by the students of interior design studies at the EASD (Art School and Design College) in Castelló who have participated as co-researchers with their professors. They have collected data and surveys, and have analyzed them, at the same level as the professors, but it must be pointed out that they have not been part of the methodological design or the research of the theoretical framework for this work. This research process with co-investigating students has several advantages: • the student has active participation in his learning, and builds his knowledge himself, making this learning more meaningful. • this learning is also collaborative and several different visions are obtained with the analysis of the data, therefore the result of the research is richer. The investigation has been carried out through the study of shopping centres in the city of Castelló de la Plana, some existing, and others already disappeared. For this purpose, architectural plans of these centres have been obtained, and have been analyzed in the classroom. Also, the students have carried out surveys directed at the users of these shopping malls. These surveys included the operation of drawing from memory a map (cognitive map), by the user, in which he indicated the route he usually takes and landmarks that he remembered of this shopping mall. And before surveying users and analyzing the plans, the student researchers themselves self-surveyed, also making such mental maps only from their memories. Another additional advantage is that being design students, the maps they drew were of greater significance than the maps produced by a typical user. Finally, the collected cognitive maps have been interpreted in the classroom, and a collective map has been made as an overlay of the individual maps. This work based on the interpretation of the legibility of a place through cognitive maps drawn by users, had as a pioneer Kevin Lynch [1], in the 60s. The users he chose to make cognitive maps of his campus were students of architecture, so the definition of these maps provided more information than a standard user would have given. Similarly, this aspect has also reinforced this research, by having interior design students. Through this work, it has been shown that the atrium, understood as a space open to light, but covered, with several storeys high that faces an empty central space, and with a circular path around this void, is an artefact typical of the most current shopping malls. It is an artefact designed and used by today's human being, Homo Ludens, with complexity proportional to the current evolutionary stage of our species. The way to use this utensil or artefact includes the time we spend in it and how we go through it. In cognitive maps, it has been found that the atrium is positively remembered by the surveyed users. The atrium appears in the superposition of the individual maps, repeating itself in many of them. It is an area of high cognition, and it is not a physical or material element, but rather an experience, a sensation, a hole. The atrium, as a design, is part of a current urban planning strategy for interior public spaces, valid to regenerate malls that do not work (instead of abandoning or demolishing them) or to project new shopping malls. Designing atria to remodel obsolete shopping malls is part of a wider trend called demalling.

One of the requirements far interior design students l.(y the Council far Interior Design Accreditation is to be "prepared to nore in a variety of contexts as nell as across geographic, political social environmental cultnral, and economic conditions. " To help JJ1ith this preparation, facztlty partners from tJJ'O instimtions=-tbe University of Minnesota Interior Design program and the Obafemi .Anolono University Architecture program in Nigeria-created 11niqtte learning experiences far their students using the collaborative online international learning (COIL) framenore. The main goal of this teaching methodology is to develop students' cross-cultnral competence l.(y linking 1miversity classes in different countries. TJJ'o COIL projects nere chosen to help students practice solving design problems nbile responding to specific sociocultura! contexts. Stndents from both countries benefited from this learning experience. Findings from students' reflections after the experiences indicated deeper interadtural sensitivity in their design solutions and appreciation of technology and collaborative learning. Overall the COIL frameuore strengthened the integration of tmtlticztlt1tral learning experiences in both settings.

The recent pandemic has definitively challenged the organisational models orchestrated by Management Science for tertiary work and, consequently, the spatial typologies in which it was carried out. From the pyramidal hierarchy that prevailed throughout most of the 20th century (Fontana 1981), we have moved on to matrix-type management, and then to network-based management (Allen and Henn 2007). Since the end of the 19th century, offices all over the world have seen a succession of organisations of environments such as the cellular office, the open space, the Büroladschaft, the combi-office and the networking office (Forino 2001): Each of these has proved revolutionary in its way compared to the one immediately preceding it, but none has become overriding; rather, they have often coexisted in the same professional environment, showing how work's interiors can be fluid and variously adaptable according to the needs of companies, managers and employees. The most recent transformations of the workplace, then accelerated by the pandemic, can be traced back to the global financial crisis of 2008 as well as to the almost total use of information technology (Forino 2013). The reduction and/or rotation of desks - not only understood as 'workplaces', but also as physical locations where work is performed -, preconized by Gaetano Pesce in a well-known office project (Chiat/Day TWBA, New York 1994-95), has been invariably adopted in many companies, while in 2012 the Italian government compressed the availability of individual spaces in new buildings for the tertiary sector with a special regulation (L.135/2012, art. 3, Spending Review 2) (Forino 2012). On the other hand, the improved quality and speed of online connections have enabled valid forms of telework (Butera 1995), but they have also guaranteed ubiquitous workers and freelance professionals to operate in places other than offices, such as bars, libraries, hotel rooms, airport and railway station waiting rooms, or by temporarily renting themselves in the co-working offices that now dot every city (Forino 2016). Finally, if the relationship between the latter and the workplace had in the past clear boundaries regulated by a synchronic temporality (h 9-17), it has gradually dissolved not only in reciprocal spatial and formal influences (Forino 2019), but also according to an agitated elasticity of time and place (Duffy 2008). The pandemic seems to have accelerated the processes of crisis and change already structural to the world of work over the last twenty years, opening up new scenarios densely permeated by spatial and digital delocalisation. The nomadism of many knowledge workers (Drucker 1993) has suffered a setback, due to the interruption of connections between one country and another, or between one city and another, during the forced lockdowns, while for others the only possible relocation has been their own homes, often inadequate to sustain the daily rhythms of their commitments, both because of restricted or inefficient spaces and because of the daily intrusion of the family, which is also forced to be stationary. Despite this, the productive flow of knowledge workers has not only not stopped but has increased in the hybrid panorama of work that personal resistance to Covid-19 has progressively nurtured, notwithstanding the psychological stress and physical fatigue of each (Dahik, Lovich et al. 2020). From the inconsistencies brought to light by the pandemic reality, however, interesting stimuli emerge for a new managerial culture - until recently substantially disinclined to smart working due to control issues -; for the adoption of different organisational models such as, for example, the flipped workplace which, borrowed from today's educational systems (Bergmann and Aaron 2012), develops a different relationship between individual and collective work (Bennett, Spencer et al. 2011; Nedervel and Berge 2015); for the study of new proxemics due to physical distancing and such that one can imagine low-density operational backdrops; for the permanent adoption of signs and health devices to safeguard those who will also attend the office. In this perspective, another worksphere (Antonelli 2001) already seems to be taking shape, no longer defined only by the physical place where work was and is experienced, but expressed by the set of social, psychological and economic conditions surrounding it, by the increasingly advanced technological tools, and by the other places where people work. From the more interconnected confines of a remodelled home environment, it will not lock the human being into a mobile, transparent individual bubble as imagined by Hans Hollein in his Mobiles Büro (1969). Instead, it will seek to maximise relationships of reciprocity and collaboration between colleagues - where and when they can meet in person - and to enhance the workplace within, "the workplace that is inside people: their training, their work and personal histories, their aspirations and potential" (Butera 2020, 83), in line with a cultural movement that will accompany the fourth industrial revolution. Architects and office designers are tasked with creating inclusive frames for the post-pandemic workplace.

The issue of gender inequality in architecture has been part of the profession’s discourse for many years, yet the continuing gender imbalance in architectural education and practice remains a difficult subject. This book seeks to change that. It provides the first ever attempt to move the debate about gender in architecture beyond the tradition of gender-segregated diagnostic or critical discourse on the debate towards something more propositional, actionable and transformative.

To do this, A Gendered Profession brings together a comprehensive array of essays from a wide variety of experts in architectural education and practice, touching on issues such as LGBT, age, family status, and gender-biased awards.

Link to book purchase page:
http://www.ribabookshops.com/item/a-gendered-profession/87837/

James Bond'un Soğuk Savaş'ın en sıcak dönemlerinden birisinin yaşandığı 1962 yılından günümüze değin 23 adet film ve 6 farklı oyuncunun canlandırmış olduğu Bond kişiliği (persona: maske) ile adeta bir 'dizi-film' gibi, kendisini devamlı yenileyerek 'güncel' kalabilmeyi başarmış olduğu görülmektedir. Milletler üstü popüler kültürün önemli bir parçası olan Bond kimliğinin vazgeçilmez bir unsuru olarak, oyunculaşarak anlatıları dahi biçimlendirebildiği görünen sahne tasarımlarınınsa, 20. Yüzyıl'dan günümüze, mimarlık kitaplarının dışında da kalabilen popüler kültürdeki yaygın ve güncel eğilimleri saptayabilmek için her biri birer basın-yayın kazıbilim buluntusu olarak ele alınabilecek 23 adet olanak sunmakta olduğu görülmektedir. Bu çalışmada 19. Yüzyıl dedektif romanlarının yerini alan casus filmlerinin kendisinden sonra gelenleri için bir 'ilk tür' olan örneği Bond'un mekânlarından kurulu düzeni şahsında temsil eden M'ninki, mimarlıkla kimlik ve gelecek algısı bağlamlarında ele alınmıştır.

This research explored the changes that may have occurred in attitudes of people in Saudi Arabia toward their dwellings due to the mandatory quarantine from COVID-19. Two online surveys, one from before the lockdown and one after the lockdown, assessed residents' space requirements. A follow up in-person survey asked about specific aspects of their homes and how their impression of home had changed during the lockdown. It was found that based on their lockdown experiences, residents were moving away from traditional cultural activities such as hospitality and trending toward spaces that would function for family activities such as studying, work from home and entertainment. Further research should examine if these trends remain after former outside pursuits resume.