Happy New Year!
I had a few interior design epiphanies in 2020 – revisiting what really matters in my service to people which is "design for people”.
This year I am rethinking the idea of interior design in terms of spaces, objects and surfaces, ambience and the way they can be used in interior spaces as a support system for the people who inhabit these spaces. There has been a sensationalism around the interpretation of interior spaces that bothered me deeply - so much bling and in a lot of cases, little to no connection. A major trigger for me was a seminar I attended on neuroscience and its use in architecture and interior design. This seminar inspired my just completed paper on the subject of how neuroscience can help in the design of inclusive spaces as a support system for children living with ADHD. I've got to tell you - really digging into neuroscience in architecture and design opened my eyes to so many deep and meaningful things. I don't think I will ever see to design the same way again after the past four months of research and writing.
So, based on this little epiphany of mine, I am setting the tone for my work on the concept of rethink!
We all have been forced or nudged into re-evaluating a lot of ideas around how we live – our relationships with our spaces and how we can orchestrate these spaces to be havens of mental, emotional, and physical support.
I hope that I will be able to provide useful content that will help you revolutionise the way you live in your most intimate space – your home – and perhaps use that model to create home and working environments that foster productivity and room to regenerate; because we all need space to recharge our batteries regardless of where that space is located.
As human beings evolve and new scientific findings highlight problems and technologies that were before now unknown to us, we begin to re-evaluate old ways of looking at and doing things – these old approaches and methods start to feel outdated as they can no longer support the new and evolved systems of living.
This forces us to think broader than we did previously, deeper and more intuitively about the needs of people in the built environment. This past year highlighted, some quite harshly and not only in interior design and architecture, the dynamics of human relationships we took for granted. For me, it was starting to understand that our environment is a major trigger for behavioural change or modification. Our brains are plastic and so much so that they are constantly orchestrating and re-orchestrating themselves to the stimulus they receive from our environment; and guess what? These environments are determined by us.
Can we live alongside a digital world without losing humanity in designed spaces? The answer is yes.
This is an exciting discovery that means for me as an interior designer, that way beyond making spaces habitable and aesthetically pleasing, the power to truly designing spaces that encapsulate utility, character and identity lies in understanding the intricacies of the human-space connection - a large part of which neuroscience plays a key role.
I have been reading a book titled Rethinking Design by Shashi Caan, and in this book she highlights that “like other endeavours - design - that thought for human act that gives shape to all cultures, must be recast to embrace systems thinking”.
I couldn't agree more.
Systems thinking in simple terms means looking at interior design spaces from a holistic perspective- that is not just looking at space in terms of how it looks or how it functions, but by looking at it from the lens of how it functions as a whole with the inclusion of the user within it? And a huge part of this question for me is "what does the user need?"
This article says it quite eloquently "Systems thinking replaces reductionism (the belief that everything can be reduced to individual parts) with expansionism (the belief that a system is always a sub-system of some larger system), and analysis (gaining knowledge of the system by understanding its parts) with synthesis (explaining its role in the larger system of which it is a part)"
What does this mean for me as a designer? It means revisiting and relearning human behaviour in order to understand – really understand human need in the built environment that is targeted and specific.
At the heart of interior design is an understanding of qualities that help to shape the void of interior spaces into habitable space. These qualities are both abstract and tangible; and both must be constructed in a way that creates a holistic synergy of the utility, emotional connection and aesthetics of space.
Did you find this article inspiring? What are your thoughts on need-specific design and how has this past year with the lockdown inspired the way that you live indoors? I would love to read from you :-)
Stay curious! Stay awesome.
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