I was recently asked what I would want my overall impact as a designer to be. I have been thinking about this question a lot in the past few months, and I find myself being both inspired and overwhelmed by it. One of the most fascinating things I find in design is that there are so many faucets of it. It seems that no matter where your passions lay you can fulfill them through interior design. Within the field of interior design there are numerous sub fields: commercial, health care, residential, hospitality, retail, etc. Within those sub-fields there are even more specialties. Are you interested in finishes, the human response, the psychological well-being of the client, the research of design aspects, or the context to the building’s surrounding? There are countless other specialties you can go into beyond these. How do you dig through all of the areas and decide what you want your impact to be? This is a question that I am still working through, but I am making some great strides toward its conclusion.
Inspiring Interior. source.http://besthomenews.com/the-house-of-demi-moore-and-ashton-kutcher/
I am very inspired by how design can be used to enhance the health, connection and well-being of its user. I have poured over countless of pages of articles, books and interviews of how humans psychologically respond to our built environment. Some of this deals with the Mind-Body connection. This investigates how our responses to the built environment can aid or hinder our health and well-being. I would like to connect this science into my designs. I am interested in discovering what the things are that make one space more psychologically comforting/healing than another. How can we use the manipulation of these elements to bring the benefits of these designs to everyone and not just the elite? I knew from an early time that I wanted to focus my efforts on healing environments and not waste my time on designing simply “pretty” or “cool” environments for the sake of them being “cool” or “pretty”. If I am going to pour my passion and time into a design I want it to add to the better whole of the users.
Mind-Body Connection. source http://helpingpsychology.com/the-mind-body-connection-how-you-might-be-making-yourself-sick
Furthermore, I believe that we are genetically connected nature more than to the built environment. I would like to find ways to sustainably incorporate a more seamless connection between our built environment and our natural one. I want my designs to discover new ways to give back to the ecological system rather than stripping it of its resources for the sake of my designs. Perhaps this would reinforce my desire to raise awareness of the larger ecological system to my users through my designs.
Connection to Nature. source.http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/penseur/
To date, I have decided that I want my impact as a designer to be one that seamlessly inspires and connects my user. I want my spaces to reinforce the long forgotten knowledge that we have the potential to achieve superior accomplishments without stripping others and our resources of their potential. Furthermore, I want my interiors to remind us that we are all connected. I plan on doing this through transparency in my designs and expressing the construction and connection of elements. Above all, I want my spaces to subconsciously heal the users while reconnecting them to the larger picture of our natural connection to each other as well as all living elements of the world.