The year is 2010. Members of the interior design profession have witnessed many developments during the past 15 years. These developments have raised the field to a level of professionalism that we have strived to achieve for several decades. Some of the more notable developments include:

• A knowledge base that documents increased profits and productivity for clients resulting from interior design-based solutions, thus increasing the demand for the services of the interior designer.
• Enhanced collaboration between industry, practice and education in the development of new products that are more cost effective and also more specific in addressing the design issues of society.
• Recognition of the realm of expertise in the interior design profession by allied professionals who seek consultation for knowledge specific to problem resolution.
• The valuing of the profession by society, resulting from an expanded and specialized knowledge base that addresses global and societal needs.
• Public perception of interior design as a service-based profession supported by an expanding knowledge base that links design with business, art and science.
• Recognition of interior design as a separate and distinct profession focusing on the well-being of people and addressing the physiological and psychological needs of users in environments.
• An interior design research institute composed of all members of the design community--practice, industry, education and client--which assists in developing an expanding knowledge base and serves as a clearinghouse for new information and emerging technologies that facilitate problem resolution for designers.

We must convince the allied design professions of our expertise, and we must provide documentation that we have a body of knowledge which is continually developing and addresses human needs in the designed environments.

This was the vision (Vision 2010) of the 15 participants of the Polsky Forum, a group representing leaders in the interior design practice, industry and education who met in May, 1994. The group came together to create a vision for the future of the profession and to discuss how research and graduate education support this vision.

Making Interior Design Necessary
The forum recognized that the interior design profession, as it presently stands, is "broken" and that our survival as a separate and distinct profession depends upon making ourselves necessary to society by addressing global and societal needs. Further, industry, practice and education must all band together to change the perception of interior design as an elitist service profession. We must convince the allied design professions of our expertise, and we must provide documentation that we have a body of knowledge which is continually developing and addresses human needs in the designed environments.

In addressing the current ills of the profession and achieving the vision for 2010, strengthening the knowledge base that is unique to interior design is essential for survival. The profession as a whole must recognize that legitimization occurs outside of the marketplace through the building of a separate and distinct knowledge base that increases the designer's ability to predict how a design will function and satisfy users. Therefore, the interrelationship between the creation of new and expanded knowledge and the role that graduate education plays in that process must be addressed. However, this interrelationship is unclear to practitioners.

Society's professions generally are both challenged and built by graduate education within universities. New theories and specializations emerge and the knowledge base is continuously expanded by testing and dialogue. Yet our profession of interior design has not fully accepted its responsibility for supporting the research and development required to expand an emerging knowledge base. Very few practicing interior designers have graduate degrees, nor do they hire researchers with graduate degrees to be a part of their design practice. Research and development aimed at generating new knowledge just is not part of professional practice as we know it today.

One reason for this lack of clarity is that although practitioners and educators both use the term "research," they have very different meanings for this word. Practitioners define research in terms of the end use of knowledge, using trade sources--product catalogs and design magazines--in their problem solving phase of design.

By contrast, educators define research as the generation of new knowledge. New information is reported in refereed academic journals but seldom in the trade publications that are used by practitioners. Thus, the effort that goes into the generation and testing of knowledge generally is not used by practitioners. More importantly, the knowledge seldom becomes a part of the dialogue of design outside of classrooms. In order to achieve the vision for 2010, we must expand this knowledge base and raise interior design to a new platform of practice.

What Will an Expanded Knowledge Base Do?
An expanded knowledge base increases the professionalism of interior design in our practice, education and research. It enables us to move forward to a new platform for problem solving and gives us the opportunity to address those issues in the designed environment that are of concern to an ever changing and complex society. Thus our value to society and to ourselves increases.

An expanded knowledge base moves us into new markets and provides the opportunity to enhance and deliver new and reliable services to our clients. An expanded knowledge base adds value to interior design, making it a critical partner for shaping the built environment so it will not be seen as a disposable commodity during tough economic times. An expanded knowledge base propels interior designers into a specialized role among the designed environment professions. An expanded knowledge base creates demand, validates our value and advances our credibility. In short, a vital and ever expanding knowledge base is essential to the survival of our profession.

We have an exhausting knowledge base upon which undergraduate education is founded. We have used this to define what our profession does. But this is no longer sufficient to sustain us because it does not explain how and why design connects to a complex post-modern society.

Designers have survived and in many cases prospered in the competitive marketplace of the past 20 years. Now it is time to capitalize on the gains we have made in understanding the relationship between people and place. For the design profession to achieve its full potential, a number of efforts must be made. Practitioners must take what they have learned in their applied fields back to the researchers for testing and validation of principles. Researchers must make these findings accessible to the public and practitioners by writing summaries of research findings so they can be applied. Together we must systematically build and expand our knowledge base in order to survive the continual development of a global, sophisticated, information society.

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