The interior design industry is stepping up its case for professionalism, claiming that regulation can create a respected career path for graduates and so distinguish them from all the ‘cushion scatterers’

After a decade or more of being clumped in with the TV ‘cushion scatterers’, real interior designers are fighting back from grassroots level – with the Society of British Interior Design (SBID) and Interiors Educators throwing their all in together.

The long-term plan in essence is to create a clear professional career path for interior designers with a degree as its starting point and eventually some kind of official professional sanction.

The SBID was formed in April last year and now has more than 1,000 interior design and architect members. It has also spent much of the past year lobbying both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the Bank of England and in Europe, to put across its case for professionalism, backed up with research that pegs the interior design profession as employing more than 186,000 people in the UK and generating £11.6bn in annual turnover.

Interior Educators, meanwhile, formed in 2006 and gives a voice to interior design education covering 35 of the UK’s leading design institutions and universities, including Glasgow and Chelsea schools of art, Edinburgh College of Art, Ravensbourne College, ManchesterMetropolitan, Brighton and Kingston universities and the University ofWales Institute, Cardiff.

IE director and Manchester Metropolitan programme leader of BA Interior Design, Graeme Brooker, says: ‘For us as educators, we are sending out our students now after three years or four as postgraduates and they are calling themselves interior designers. Then there’s someone from a private school, who after six weeks’ learning a computer package and maybe having to do their bedroom and scatter a few cushions are also calling themselves interior designers. That is not very fair and it undermines what we do.’

SBID chairman Vanessa Brady fully agrees, and sees the degree standard as the basis of a professional career: ‘In fact, you don’t even need to do a six-week course,’ she adds. ‘You can just say you’re a designer and you are a designer. That is why our industry is often not treated seriously. We want to set a benchmark for interior design so that the consumer, whether that is trade or public, knows that there is a kind of register for design professionals in order to create a real profession, like bankers or accountants.’

However, Brady is well aware that they are just setting off on this road and it’s unlikely to be an easy journey: ‘It’s a hard thing to sell – we are saying “at the moment, you can do anything you like, but join us, and pay for regulation, so that we’ll tell you what you can and can’t do!” We have to go right back to the very basics, and to sell anything as a profession it means that it is founded on education.’

Before opting to go with the SBID, the IE talked with a veritable alphabet soup of design bodies, including the IDA and the BIID (formerly the BID) and latterly has had contact with the CSD. Brooker is at pains to point out that the SBID relationship is not exclusive, but adds that it was the one organisation that stressed the importance of the degree as the starting point ‘which for us as educators is spot on’.

Conversations are now aimed at ensuring the degree courses are turning out individuals suited to the industry, and that once they leave there is a real career path for them to follow.

One pragmatic step being pushed by Brady is that every student on an IE interiors course should be offered an internship with one of its corporate members, and that there are agreed criteria for what happens during that internship.

The idea is that it will provide some measurable skills, not a period of making coffee or collecting dry cleaning. And the internship will be just the beginning of a relationship that sees the provider becoming in effect a mentor, having to ‘adopt’ the student for a minimum of a year.

A number of other initiatives are planned this year by the SBID. ‘We will be continually endorsing the fact that we are seeding the profession from the roots up,’ Brady adds.

A degree of separation

Separately, but in a similar vein, the Chartered Society of Designers has recognised a degree course as part of a move to ‘publicly identify design courses that provide students with a level of design education that prepares them to practice to the highest professional standards’.

The BA (Hons) Architectural Venue Design course at the University of Derby, which focuses on the design of interior spaces of buildings ranging from bars, restaurants and night clubs to live performance spaces, theme and amusement parks, and sports stadia, is the first course in CSD’s Course Accreditation Programme.

Chris Ramsden, CSD president, says: ‘We have worked closely with academia to develop this initiative, ensuring that it fully supports the study of design. The programme further cements the relationship between design education and professional practice.’

This article was first published in FX Magazine.