Beginning to Understand

Where to begin? Its hard to think about not being able to have an answer for a question as simple as what do you do? You would think that if I'm dedicating my time and money to an education for a profession that I plan on doing for the rest of my life that would be all I could talk about. Sure, it many ways that is all I talk about, I spend a significant time in school and all we talk about its our projects, classes, challenges, and accomplishments. On the other hand, the rest of the time that I'm not in school all I can talk about is how much I have to do for school. However, the person on the other side of these conversations is either in class next to me or knows me well enough to tolerate all the nagging. The real issue is talking to the general public, the person at the grocery store, a customer at work, a new acquaintance, my doctor. These people that make up most of the public that have  no knowledge to what an interior designer does? or even worse the people that have been lead to believe all kinds of misconceptions about the profession.

I want them to understand and appreciate the value of this profession. I've been on that other side that assumes knowing what this as a career entails so I can understand the misconceptions. However, my time at the The Art Institute of Tampa has opened my eyes to depths and quality of what it takes to be an interior designer. Here I've been taught about space, form and function, about the process and all the work that goes into a project. Weird huh? the end result to the careless eye seems as simple as picking out paint, materials and buying furniture. Not being aware that there is a whole process that consist of the beginning stages of research, case studies, programmatic development, formal analysis, ideation, conceptual development, construction documents, detailing, material selections, rendering, perspective drawings, 3D modeling. All of theses are just some of the important steps of the process without considering all the different steps require to accomplish each of these.

The main point that I would want others to understand is that there reason, thought, psychology behind the decisions that are made when working with a space the aesthetics are as important but only because of the all the beginning stages that must be consider to make an interior successful. In other words, we should consider how important the functionality of a space, building, environment is in all aspects in order to begin to appreciate how important it is what an interior designer does.