Why does everyone think they can do this profession of ours? Why is it that, to the public, it appears so easy to practice that almost anyone with a bit of aesthetic eye can do it? That all interior designers do is nudge a few things just a bit better than the able amateurs? And especially, that all the adjacent construction-related professions are considered designers?
I once was told that all interior designers do is arrange furniture and pieces created by others. That they are some sort of curators. Some are. But the profession itself is so much more than that.
One of the critical things that killed it is what makes it fascinating for the ones that get the difference: that artistic lightbulb of seemingly natural talents lurking in one’s biological being, waiting to be rescued.
That affinity to the artistry that some of us feel, the one that propels us to career choices, is not enough to become a professional.
Building homes in one city, in one historical time, even if for 10-20 years out of the thousands that have taught us how will only teach you how to reapply what you’ve done before. Like a mason passing on the skill of the trade, design is nothing more than a copy of something done before, taken and presented to a new client. Don’t get me wrong, for some homeowners, that’s enough. They do not need nor care to know what they are missing. The casual dabbing in design of all the pseudo-designers with a claim to flair and professional knowledge generates over and over the same designs and applies them to a myriad of homes.
No physicist would ever hear that so-and-so writer, driver, or chemist is practicing physics because they have a flair for it. Or that their contribution is actually applied to a physics experiment. No. Science is smarter than that. Smarter than to allow untrained people to claim they are scientists. Yet design and architecture, even art, seem much more flexible and shy to protest. And that’s why we have so much bad design and bad art.
Talent is a glimpse. On the other hand, design is a controlled and learned process of evoking solutions to solve the problem at haned. Every good design directly results from particular factors that a professional knows how to summon at will and, yes, the epiphany. Because when you deal with someone that’s been doing it for a while, they have it in their gut. Any response they give you to a professional question is laden with years of experience and value despite being delivered as if it were a casual talk over the weather.
Those who have spent considerable time learning from history and then figuring out themselves how to convert requirements into solutions can generate designs that no other amateur would. The germ of a design idea is nothing without contextualizing it to a person, a business, a place, or an architecture through the fluid perfection of a well-composed whole.
Worthy interior design advice is problem-solving and solutions that you can directly apply to your everyday living. If you, as an amateur, develop them and make your own world better, that’s great. To be capable of doing it for someone else and doing it professionally that’s an entirely different story.
Image courtesy of Dochia Interior Design
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