Hoa Vo

This article presents lessons learned from collaborative service-learning projects aimed at bridging the gap between theory and practice by providing students design experiences in authentic settings. Interior design students gained disciplinary and civic benefits while problem solving for a preK-5 elementary school calming room, dining room, and teacher sanctuary. The elementary school teachers and staff reported the redesigned calming room supported students’ emotional and self-regulation skills. Teachers and staff also reported the dining room and teacher sanctuary supported the school community well-being. The authors’ present findings and hope the article can serve as a model for educators interested in community building service-learning projects in school environments.

Interior design education aims to provide students with real learning experiences. The authors, hence, combined problem-based learning (PBL) and design thinking to design a seven-week studio project in the Interior design program at a land-grant Midwest university. Thirty-two sophomores were engaged in different stages of the design process for the education wing of Minnesota’s official natural history museum in collaboration with Perkins+ Will, a global architecture and design firm.

An interdisciplinary team from the Interior Design (ID) and the Center for Sustainable Building Research (CSBR), University of Minnesota developed a tool to inform sustainable design practices in state-funded buildings. The internet-based questionnaire called Sustainable Post Occupancy Evaluation (SPOES) provides both quantitative and qualitative analysis of building occupants’ satisfaction, health, and wellbeing via 12 indoor environmental quality (IEQ) categories. Since 2009, SPOES has provided business and building owners, architects, interior designers, facility managers of 60 state-funded workplace, classroom and residence hall buildings IEQ scores of occupants’ satisfaction to help them better engage building occupants and bring employee health and wellbeing to the forefront of their practices. This presentation will cover the SPOES questionnaire and report formats, results from workplace, classroom, residence hall buildings, and implications for evaluating the impacts of buil...

Despite being used extensively in design pedagogies, the practice of feedback in studio classrooms has not received sufficient attention. There are limited theoretical and operational guidelines to help instructors improve students’ learning outcomes using this educational method. Taking into account the complexity and diversity of feedback, the authors conducted a mixed-method study on this account within the scope of interior design education. As institutional programs connect more with professional environments, instructors are no longer the sole source of feedback in design studios. Invited practitioners offer students the insightful understanding of current trends, manufacture capacities, and market challenges. This type of feedback, together with the ones of instructors, are likely to influence students’ creative performance. Three consecutive lighting design classes from 2015 to 2017 at a Midwest land-grant University became the context for the authors to explore the impact of practitioner feedback on their students’ creativity. This paper is a presentation and discussion of their initial findings.