Spotlight on Interior Design
When I tell people about my plans to become an interior designer, there are various reactions. After they digest the word, some people’s eyes widen like they never even considered that a person could do that for a job. With incredulous fascination, they proceed to bombard me with questions that I’m happy to answer. Others look at me, furrow their brows, and say with a biting, sarcastic tone, “So the people that put pillows on couches? Like those decor boards on Pinterest?” In that case, I grit my teeth, force out a sickeningly sweet smile, and resist the urge to roll my eyes and deck them in the face. Correcting them, I respond “interior design, not decoration. Who do you think forms the interiors of every single building you’ve ever been in? Architects only form the outside shell– everything else is done by interior designers. They do so much more than putting a pillow on a couch.” These misconceptions get on my nerves more than anything. So why is it that interior design, despite being present throughout our daily lives, is either overlooked or misunderstood?
To begin with, careers in the arts are frequently looked down upon, underpaid, and generally overshadowed by careers in STEM and the humanities. People seem to forget just how integral these people are to our society. Who hasn’t heard a story about a person who had a bursting passion for the arts, or an innate knack for it, but didn’t pursue it because it’s seen as a career that isn’t “respectable” and “profitable”? Yes, it can be difficult to make your way to the top as an artist– hence the whole “starving artist” stereotype–but any career can be difficult. Either way, the arts are the key to the way our society runs now– if it wasn’t for art, we would be nowhere. The buildings that we spend every waking moment in are created by artists. Everything from the clothes and makeup we wear, the movies we watch, the paintings we hang, even the covers of the books we read. It’s all tied to art and artists. So in fact, I’d say art is one of the most respectable and important professions a person can choose. Artists combine beauty and functionality, which is the precise balance that our entire society has run on for centuries and will continue to run on for as long as it exists.
Now to focus on interior design– why is the perception of it so different from what it truly is? Interior design and interior decorating frequently get mixed up. Interior design is more than just a visual job. It’s both the art and science of working with architects on spatial planning and structural execution to understand people’s behavior and create functional rooms within a building. Designers work with the shapes of a room’s walls, floors, and more, essentially creating interior architectural forms. Interior decorating, on the other hand, is more like beautifying a previously existing space. Decorators come in after the space is designed and they work with the final aesthetic decisions– color schemes, textures, lighting, art, furniture, and other decorations. Essentially, interior decorating is a subset of interior design– interior designers may decorate, but decorators stay entirely hands-off throughout the design process. These two professions can bleed into each other, but in the end, interior designers are the ones who have a more complex job. Thus, interior designers are the ones that generally go to a four-year university, pursue a degree, get licensed, and end up working at higher class firms, hand in hand with architects. Decorators can take a shorter course at a community college and get a certificate or can choose not to take a course at all, and either way, they’ll be qualified to work. So when the distinction between the two is muddy, it makes it appear as though interior design is a “basic” or “easy” field. In reality, it’s anything but easy– it’s just gotten mixed with interior decorating. This also brings down the overall salary statistics for interior design. Interior decorators make a lower salary due to their qualifications. Since interior designers are few and far between, decorators seem to make up the majority of the field, thus bringing down the salary statistics and discouraging people from working in the field. Even I was guilty of that thought (a simple Google search made me question, “why do they make so little?!”) before I did further research and realized how the lines between these two fields are blurred. One field does simple work on the surface level, building an aesthetically pleasing environment in an existing space, and the other focuses on detailed work, turning a building from an empty shell into a functional space that benefits the occupants’ quality of life.
This lack of distinction, as well as the vision of interior design as a purely artistic field, is what seems to discredit it as a respectable and profitable career path. In fact, its blend of artistic creativity, as well its focus on creating technical, functional, and people-friendly environments, is what drew me towards the field in the first place. Interior design is one of the artistic cornerstones of our society and is a much more difficult and intricate job than people give it credit for.
