The MFA in Interior Design program builds upon Parsons's rich history of interior design to re-think the field and its influence on the human experience: to bring expansive and speculative approaches to design with rigorous study and conscientious awareness of the environmental impact, historical precedent, craftsmanship, human health, and social change. The program has a studio-centered, research-oriented focus that challenges students to holistically explore human perception, human behavior, and comfort of the built interior.

Dispersed and isolated, the imposed seclusion presented by the pandemic became a challenge for our MFA Interior Design Studio to deep dive into invention, introspection, and the unimaginable. The imposed isolation forces a re-definition of interiority as our homes suddenly magnify as a shielded place of refuge, while technology allows the individual to feel even more boundless and permeable. Within the new strangeness, hierarchies we have constructed as interior designers feel less permanent and intangible.  

Issues of advocacy, preservation, and ethnography challenge the interior designer to provide agency for the underserved. Personal belongings, co-habiting organisms, and objects of surveillance take on new meaning and urgency. The desire to connect with the outside heightens as we stay home.

And yet within the diverse range of projects, they all embrace a rigorous and impassioned investigation to find the spirit of what lies beneath the problem. They all create narratives that provoke so that we can reframe the normalcy we’ve come to accept.  Ultimately, design and ideas that speak profoundly do not find an end or a solution but a way to translate back to the community.  We listen to stories and teach ourselves how to design a more inclusive, just, and sustainable world.

A public restroom in Addis Ababa; a DIY skate obstacle event as space making for women, queer, and gender diverse skaters; a temporary home and long-term community for international students studying in New York; these are just a few examples of the thesis projects from this interior design thesis studio. The geographical, cultural, spatial, and physical diversity of these projects represents the manifold potentials of critical and expansive interior design practice. 

In this thesis studio, we approached interior design as a practice, a way of doing, a sequencing of actions that work to respond to a particular issue, problem, or opportunity for change. Students sought out and researched an area of interest or opportunity that they were passionate or excited about (including how to listen to trees, the temporal event of lunchtime in midtown as commensality, and the value of hand drawing in interior design pedagogy) and sought to respond to it through interior design practice. The focus here is not on ‘the interior’ as an object or a spatial volume described by architecture but rather, on interior design as a practice, a practice that is critical and experimental, and able to produce a positive contribution to communities, cultures, or ecologies. 

Projects ranged in materiality and technology (from exploring the act of weaving as a collective practice of care, to a hi-tech virtual retail fitting room) and scale (one project speculates a new life for the rooftops of New York, expanding into a citywide commuter network), but all the projects are united by a sense of curiosity, experimentation, and the desire to make a positive change in the world through interior design.

At Parsons School of Constructed Environments (SCE), design is understood as being in a unique position to respond to some of the most pressing issues of our time and that addressing complex problems requires expertise that spans across traditional disciplinary boundaries. From multidisciplinary coursework across the curriculum to the sharing of studio space, students in Parsons’ Masters programs in Architecture, Interior Design, and Lighting Design learn and are exposed to the issues and processes of varied design disciplines throughout their graduate study. Although the benefits and insights of interdisciplinary thinking are evidenced throughout the SCE, the student work included in the Interdisciplinary studio was completed in thesis labs structured to support cross disciplinary problem solving. With student researchers from SCE hybrid degree programs, thesis work features a shared topical framework centered on the integration of lighting design and architecture and lighting design and interior design respectively. This thesis work engages these fields against the boundaries of current practice, while simultaneously questioning the assumptions upon which these professions operate. The quality and understanding represented in this thesis research affirms the SCE belief that addressing the most complex problems of today and tomorrow demands a willingness to engage in critical thinking across disciplinary boundaries.

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