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What’s your personal design philosophy? Begin your answer with “I believe interiors should be…”.
I believe interiors should be a satisfying work for both the designer and the inhabitants as individual and they altogether as a group unit. For example, a residential design should concern about each family member’s individual situation, and their collective activities as a family.
Facing all kinds of personalities and situations in life, a designer should be versatile enough to create diverse styles of good design to satisfy the various needs and different characters. Besides the artistic ability to handle different styles, a designer needs to have the ability to give love to strangers, from the bottom of his/her heart. With such quality, the designer can then bring the sympathy emotion into the rational process of design, embody the design with great loving potentials for the inhabitants. I think this is the most essential element for designers to create an outstanding piece that will last forever.
With passion to life, the designer should bring the efficiency and functionality into interior, making the space ecological for both the environment and the health. Designers should not abuse their power to create by consuming energy and resources ruthlessly to satisfy the selfish design ambition.
Define a specific historical design philosophy – include unique characteristics, dates, names and color.
Bauhaus is the common term for the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art and architecture school in Germany that operated from 1919 to 1933 and briefly in the United States from 1937-1938 and for the approach to design that it developed and taught. It generated a new design trend in architecture and interior that still popular to today. Emanating from the Arts and Crafts movement, Bauhaus immerged as a post war design style that promoted “form follows function” and favored simplicity. Unlike Arts and Crafts, Bauhaus embraced technology, new materials and the mass production of furnishings and fixtures.
The Bauhaus interior have following features:
Walls: Walls are simple, without moldings or embellishment; painted white or neutral tones. The use of glass as walls becomes an important innovation in Modern Style, largely due to the advent of new material use, like steel, in construction. Glass bricks are installed, often in combination with raw concrete – for that Le Corbusier touch.
Floors: Natural elements become the mainstay. Wood, stone, brick, and cork compliment the open, airiness of modern interiors, adding just the right amount of natural organics to compliment the concrete and glass structure. Abstract patterned rugs, such as kilim rugs, help soften the linearity and add character to the modern interior.
Windows: Plain white curtains or Venetian blinds allow light to enter the interior without detracting from the open, uncluttered spaces. Or for a daringly modern look, no window coverings at all!
Accents: This is the place for color and organic forms and textures. Modern art, particularly in Mondrian-style primary colors, and geometric, black and white. Throw pillows can be exiting influences, covered in primary colors or interesting fabric patterns. Curved glass ashtrays, translucent or colored art glass, and mobiles continue the contemporary feel by implying light and airiness. Natural objects and materials like twig arrangements, bamboo, sisal or coir balance industrial design.
Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Charles Eames, and Eileen Gray are names associated with the Bauhaus. Eileen Gray (1879 – 1976) is one of my most admired designers. She introduced a new modern elegance with simple and yet very creative furniture structure.
What is accomplished for the client by providing a good design solution?
The designer has the responsibility to provide a good design solution for the clients. The basic requirement of a good design solution means it not only solves the existing problems, but also avoids potential future problems. Further more, a good design solution highlights an aesthetic appearance along with its strength of functionality. A thoughtful solution will save the client time, money, and worries for unnecessary repair or modification in the future.
A good design solution is a win-win for both the client and the designer: it satisfies the client’s need for a comfortable living space, and also compliments the designer’s professional career. A well executed and efficient solution will attracts more clients, and if it’s an inventive one, it pushes the designer’s career to a new horizon of success and reputation. It proves that the designer has strong knowledge and research efforts paid to solve the client’s problems, and the creativity to tackle the obstacles as well.
What elements do you think will be important in interior design ten years from now?
With the pressing global warming crisis, I think eco-design will become more and more important in every aspect of our life, especially in interior design. As a designer, when designing the living space, we should not limit our attention to the interior part, instead, should also think about how it will influence the bigger outside world. People have been selfish, securing and comforting our own needs within the expensive architecture while wasting and polluting the outside nature ignorantly. The consequences is the nature have made dreadful protests, especially in recent years, with more and more severe temperatures and damages to some regions. 10 years later, our selfish consequences, more likely, would not be ceased, but worse.
Designers need to have such conscience on top of all, to create energy-saving and efficient interior with more usage of natural light, green plants, and recycle materials, etc. We as residence should be alert to the environmental crisis and adopt an ecological life style to save the planet, and our future generations.
What factors characterize today’s “contemporary” design themes?
The highly-developed capitalism in the western has created a number of internationally popular product brands, chain stores, and media. What shapes our idea of contemporary design a lot comes from what we have received from the media today, including the furniture catalogues, magazines, the retail displays, etc. The rage of styles varies, same to the price.
With hundreds years of design development in the history, there are so many styles coexisting today, Conveniently, the images from mass media provide us choices to pick from. But what’s really making the decision is our buying power. No matter how much one admires that fancy decoration shown on magazine, if he/she can’t afford, then he/she has to go to the less expensive vendor to pick what’s offer there.
When looking so close at ourselves, and asking what is today’s cotemporary design theme, I can’t help but recalling how we as consumers comment on design, “it’s IKEA”, “that’s from Pottery Barn”, “it looks like the style in magazine”, “the textile store is in SOHO!”…
What is your favorite color combination and why-and-what color combination do you think is overused and why?
I don’t have a definite color palette for design, but I do have certain favored color choices when buying clothes, usually purple. When designing for interior, I like harmonious combination for general with small colors competition among the minor parts. I like strong color expression on wall, directly from the wall material itself, for example, concrete’s grayness, wood’s brown, and brick’s redness, etc. Proportion is the key when introducing more colors, I would like to have 1 to 2 dominant colors with some decorative colors, for example, massive gray with small part of red and blue, or reversely massive red with small part of gray and blue. There is a wide range of colors I would use as the decorative colors: purple, red, golden, silver, green, white…etc.
As to overused color combination, I think earthy color combination, such as brown, white, with orange or green, and the industrial look combinations, such as gray, black, translucent glass, with stainless steel, both become too conventional.
What did you learn last week about interior design?
The second week class is for students to present an interior designer of their choice. I learned many names of well-known interior designers that I first heard, and got glimpse of local students’ preferred interior design styles.
I think the most interesting part of this class is to learn how these established designers worked to build their names in this competitive industry. One thing I learned is all these famous designers have great strength presenting themselves and their works. They showed strong visual expression to impress people, and they are able to articulate their philosophy and biography to impress people too. To have such ability to impress people requires not just the craftsman’s skills but also a clear design concept about their choices. They insist on their favored choices and ideas and keep working on it, which I think is very important to their career success.
I also learned that a famous interior designer must have their own business.
What attributes do you think are necessary to make a good interior designer?
An admirable designer thinks out of box. He/she holds an inventive attitude through out the whole design process and set high expectation on his/her won work. Such attitude carries spirit of experimenting that makes the process fun and exciting, and it carries high standard of perfection that makes a work classic.
A good designer is also knowledgeable and hardworking. He/she would take efforts researching about the tasks in order to present the greatness and beauty of authentic history treasures to the world again, as well as provide civilized solutions to tackle the problems. A good designer will absorb all the knowledge about design, understanding the materials, color theories, lighting, fabrics, construction…, in a word, to be all-around. The hardworking quality will reward the designer with superior skills than his/her peers, and with intelligence and wisdom that one day will become the fruitful ground for inventive ideas and development.
A good designer also cares about people. He/she will try to understand the inhabitants, and take their preference and needs into consideration in the design process. He/she bears the sympathy and responsibility to pursue the best benefits for the inhabitants, and that’s why people need a good designer.
When and how did you first realize you wanted to be an interior designer?
The job title “designer” has been my ideal profession since college. I came to New York to study new media art 4 years ago. Before then, I had regarded the ability to design rooted in one’s intuitive sense and born talent. So when I finished my mater program in 2004, and realized that I can’t design, I felt very frustrated and ashamed of my lack of design sense and creativity. Luckily, I was able to remain in NY and decided to try some academic training at Parsons. I started with graphic design classes, product design, and then interior design. Among the three, out of my surprise, I enjoy interior design best. Taking interior class was purely out of interest at first place, but now the more I learned about the skills, the more confidence and inspirations I have to pursue the designer career in this field.
I really appreciate Parsons’ design training, which not only has saved my confidence in design, but also fostered my interests and ability to become an interior designer in the future. Though now I am still developing my career in web technology industry, hopefully, 2 to 3 years later, I can throw myself totally into art and design career and stay focus on it.
biedermeier
shaker
art deco
William & Mary
English Regency
Bauhaus
Art Nouveau
Classical Greece
Classical Rome
Louis XIV
Louis XV
Louis XVI
Federal
Arts and Crafts (English)
Arts and Crafts (American), AKA “Mission”
