INTERIOR DESIGN SERVICES

The practice of interior design is essentially the undertaking of activities or services in exchange for a monetary fee or another form of financial compensation, as payment for the finished design, use, and furnishing as well as manufacture of elements in interior spaces in locales such as condominiums, houses and other types of structures.

These services encompass things such as the programming of functional requirements for indoor spaces, the design planning of indoor spaces, the preparation of analytical reports regarding what the user requires in their indoor space, the preparation of drawings, designs, schematics and specifications for construction related matters, including selection, utility, localization, color and finishes of interior walls, as well as the materials, equipment, furnishings, furniture pieces and personal property to be used, the management of contracts for manufacture, acquisition or insertion of related elements and objects, in relations to relevant ceiling plans, use of space, and the manufacture of non-structural elements inside of as well as the nearby interior spaces of buildings.

THE CONTRASTS BETWEEN AN INTERIOR DESIGNER, RESIDENTIAL PLANNER/SPECIALIST AND RESIDENTIAL DECORATOR

A residential decorator is someone who is artistically inclined and uses this inclination to engage in creative activities for profit, without prior formal education or training in the field of interior design or interior design related activities, including architecture. They tend to be naturally gifted and talented for decorating the interior of a house in either a certain style or various styles. Some of the practicing residential decorators may possess certificates in specialized training such as the artistic application of paint, fabrics, carpets, tiles and other forms of materials and elements typically used in interior decorating, in order to create aesthetically gratifying residential and private dwellings. Decorators will often be self employed and offer services that may be related to the tasks performed by faux finishers, upholstery seamstresses, or employees of retail oriented businesses that offer residential decoration services as an additional service on top of a sale, such as in furniture or home improvement stores.

A residential planner is someone who typically possesses a minimum of two years formal post secondary education, typically in the form of an associates degree, where the degree is meant to concentrate on Residential Planning, and the focus of the degree is typically along the lines of space planning for private households and residential dwellings. Kitchen and Bath specialists also fall within the confines of the residential planner wider array of sub-specialties.

Residential planners are often expected to know and work hand in hand with various construction sub-trade specialties that are able to carry out their vision in an efficient and aesthetically pleasing yet functional manner. For this they might require some knowledge of the trades and their processes in the conducting of work required to carry out their artistic vision. Residential planners are typically not required to certify their skills as “Residential Planners” and are not regulated by any association as a sort of trade or professional or technical field that requires certification or licensing.

Registered and licensed interior designers are those who often have professional post secondary level degrees in the field of interior design, together with a minimum of 2 years postgraduate full time work experience in interior design or a related field, that was also under the supervision of a registered architect or is a holder of the NCIDQ certificate in the United States. These individuals are also required to pass the NCIDQ minimum competency qualifications examination after which the individuals will be deemed qualified and can officially register to practice wherever a regulatory board as a standard has the NCIDQ exam administers and upholds the quality, sanctity and ethical carrying out of duties in relations to the profession. These registered interior designers may then undertake work and duties in both the commercial and residential design markets.

DEFINING THE WHAT: RESIDENTIAL DECORATOR SERVICES

Among the services offered are aid in selecting and placing surface materials, treatments for windows, wallpaper and other forms of coverings, paint, carpets, tiles and other forms of floor coverings, lighting that is mounted on the surface, fixtures that are mounted on the surface, as well as furnishings that are loose and are not regulated by any pertinent building codes. Interior design encompasses a few skills that are derived from a few wider fields when combined create the quintessential components of what makes interior design. The parent field of several other fields, including interior design, was building engineering. It gave birth to fields such as architecture and civil engineering in addition to interior design. Ever since it’s inception, these fields have split into their own developed branches.

These skills all have things such as materials and techniques in common with each other that make them interrelated fields when it comes to the construction, design and beautification of buildings. Interior design can be seen as a related field, or somewhat of an offshoot of architectural design. In recent decades, other forms of design have arisen from these fields, some of which include Urban Planning, Mass and Public Housing, Landscape design and so forth. All of these have their roots in Architecture. It’s projected that even the field of interior design itself will eventually
branch out into more sub-fields it develops and we head into the future.

DESIGN ADJUSTMENTS, ADDITIONS AND INTERJECTIONS IN BUILDINGS

A real estate developer is typically the original designer of a building, both externally and internally. They are the ones who prepare the building to be useable and livable without any further need for adjustments, and as a result has the bare minimum that is to be expected of a building. These buildings, depending on the materials used, can last anywhere from several decades to several centuries or longer, and while they exist, must be maintained, altered, restored, or upgraded at least a few times in order to be viable as a structure, both in terms of structural integrity but also in terms of their intended usefulness. Architects and building engineers will often avoid getting engaged in such frivolous pursuits of minor details where the scope of the work as well as the pay is not high enough to warrant the mobilization of their skills. During and before the early Middle Ages, low skilled laborers called “Art Painters” were hired to decorate the interior walls and ceilings, both in the interior and the exterior of a building. These painters metamorphed into something reminiscent of “Decorators”, where their job was not only to paint the walls, but also to repair and maintain various elements of the building, manufacture new furniture as well as upgrade existing pieces of furniture. They worked in conjunction with several related trades to carry out their work, of which included iron smiths, guilders, glass blowers, weavers, embroiders, rug and carpet makers, sculptors and mural creators, in roles as jobbers and suppliers. Eventually all of these fields together would combine into yet a single profession – the interior decorator. Interior decoration was a service provided to a building both during phases of construction as well as afterwards, but was considered a separate field from the duties carried out by architects and engineers. Interior decorators were not considered an offshoot of architects.

Interior designers typically operate from an office and creative space known as the design studio, which is usually aptly located within cities. The studio of the interior designer functioned somewhat like an art studio, where sketches, schematics, drawings, presentations, models, pilots, prototypes, dummies, cartoons (full sized replicas of the artwork devised by the interior designer), samples and so forth. The design studios also have available copies of samples and catalogues of materials to be used in the interior design process.

The studio is usually a fixed location where the interior designer can meet clients, conduct deals with suppliers, craftsmen and trades, and present models and ideas. The studio can often be located close to a work site or several work sites, which smoothens the design and execution portion of the interior design practice. When combining both design and execution, the necessity for a strict design plan that is meticulously detailed in documentation is not very high, as decisions could be improvised and it’s dimensions executed shortly thereafter without the need for rigorous prior planning. However, there are some traditions in practice where the formality requires documentation to be thorough and communicated to a site based agency for time sensitive integration into the overall construction process.

COMBINING DESIGN AND EXECUTION INTO PRACTICE

It is often the translation of artistic and creative design into schematics with dimensions and mathematical viability that has often been the difficult and tedious aspect of interior design. This is the part of business as usual that happens to be the most frustrating to interior designers. Amateur, often unlicensed interior designers do not have the necessary formal education to translate their creative ideas into schematics that can be read by trades, engineers and architects, and will often rely on verbal instructions, typically done on the spot, to make their ideas come to life.

The vast majority of interior designers on this planet, where the jurisdiction allows the independence by regulatory design, maintain the preference of the execution of their work independent from the meddling and reliance on third parties like building contractors. As a results, there is also a traditional practice both combining both the processes of design as well as execution in order to provide this flexibility to the interior designer. In order for the interior designer to create sensorial quality, they must procure components consisting of complex details and materials. As it is often quite difficult to translate these elements to formal documentation and schematics, the interior designer relies on their own personal involvement in all steps of the project to ensure the accurate manifestation of ideas. Interior designing itself requires excellent improvisational skills. In order to coordinate all phases of the design and execution process, the interior designers themselves need to provide the bulk of materials required for this purpose. As a result, amateur or hobbyist interior designers lack the competencies and knowledge required to coordinate this entire process to fruition as certain steps dictate.

RELATED PROFESSIONS AND THEIR RELEVANCE TO INTERIOR DESIGN

Design professions, be it interior design or another design professor, tend to be interdependent on other design professions and other professional fields. Interior designers can supplement and be supplemented by other design related professions, including architects, building engineers, landscape designers, furniture and product designer, as well as exhibition and event managers. Interior designers can also incorporate the expertise and knowledge base of other professionals to assist with fulfilling their work and completing their project. Among these are environmental engineers, ecologists, experts in furniture and furnishing, textile designers, painters, sculptors and other trades and crafts persons that are relevant to the objectives at hand.

Interior designers will often be presented with a dilemma as they proceed through their studies – whether or not they should specialize in something even more specific related to their field or be a generalist that will attempt to coordinate all efforts.

With specialization, the specificity of the project will matter more, but the quality of the work done by the interior designer will substantially increase, and the niche market for that particular project will allow the designer to more easily become an expert in that field. The problem with specializations is that it requires a lot of waiting around for a project to open up where they will require your particular expertise. Therefore the number of job opportunities are significantly diminished. An interior designer who is a generalist will often have the opportunity to brush up on any specific skill sets that they want to cultivate, as most projects tend to be multi-disciplined. When refinement is added to one’s repertoire through these opportunities, it will then open up the door to more specific opportunities should they become available.

Stringent and anal retentive specialization focus in a specific field might lead the interior designer down a path that leads to the necessity of learning how to be more of a generalist anyways, as the interior designer will become bored or experience fragmentation in their work schedule and consistency in work as a result of this acute concentration into narrow mindedness. A specialist will often lose out on the opportunity to cultivate other specialties, and be called only to do work in specific projects. The generalists has benefits like cultivating experience in more specialties, cross-discipline expertise, economics of scale that include lower turnover, but the quality as previously mentioned will be reduced as efforts must be spread apart as opposed to concentrated. There is a certain level of increase becoming apparent in interior design related specializations. Some of these specializations that are gaining light in recent years include hospitality and hotel design, design of entertainment facilities such as cinemas and arcades, the design of public space such as airports and railway stations, exterior design that includes architecture you would find on the street such as horrendous contemporary sculptures, exhibitions and event planning interior design, the design of retail stores, and lastly the interior design of transport itself such as airplanes, buses and trains. These fields encompass a wide array of their own specific considerations that at this point in history are too far ranging to be perfectly known and applied by any generalist interior designer.

On the upside, interior designers have a wide variety of fields in which they can apply their skills and would be completely relevant to whatever needed to be achieved. Among these career choices include an independent or freelance design professional, a conditional associate, or even a profit sharing employee in certain organizations. Interior designers have access to many parallel career choices, including product design, prototyping, the manufacture and production – sometimes by hand – of interior parts and components, a maintenance related job for interior spaces and components, an advisor or consultant for interior design related matters, as well as in an administration position in regards to a interior design related management department.

Interior designers have a keen perception for materials and finishes, and therefore are naturally best qualified to be conservators, preservers and renovators of spaces that have already been built and possibly previously internally designed and furnished. Interior designers have sufficient competencies to mold and manipulate the existing environments and are therefore the most qualified profession when it comes to the reformation and adaptation (or reuse) of redundant structures.