“I think designers are inherently optimistic,” said Bryan Orthel, associate professor of interior design at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design. “That’s just sort of built into the way we understand the world. The things most of us are working on are tied to ‘how do we improve the human experience?’ Whether we're talking about fire safety, or aging in place, or health care environments, we begin by framing and talking about ‘what if?’ In other words, ‘If this happened, then this could happen.’”
As an interior design educator, Orthel considers it his job to help students harness that optimism, to “recognize that asking those questions and making those decisions is their way of influencing things.”
Orthel has recently expanded his own sphere of optimism. Voted president-elect of the Interior Design Educators Council (IDEC) as of May 1, Orthel will serve a three-year term at the helm of the international interior design educators association. When it was founded in 1962, IDEC sought to establish credibility for the discipline and enhance professional and pedagogical standards. By that time, the study of interior design was hardly new: formal instruction in the subject has existed at IU since 1925, predated by programs at Cornell, Parsons, and the New York School of Interior Design. Typically housed within a university’s home economics department, however, and restricted in scope to the study of domestic spaces, the discipline was long cramped by gender norms and struggled to gain legitimacy within academia.
As the field professionalized and shifted into increasingly commercial settings, Orthel explained, it needed to define its body of knowledge, establish standards to ensure the quality of the work and the qualifications of its practitioners, and ultimately elevate the discipline and profession. IDEC helped establish an independent accrediting body for programs that teach interior design (FIDER, which is now CIDA), for supporting the development of interior design credentialling exams (NCIDQ), and supporting the IDCEC, which credentials continuing education courses for professionals to stay current and acquire new skills. IDEC is also behind the Journal of Interior Design (JID), which over nearly 50 years has become available in 10,000 libraries globally. Open to any interior design educator in the world, IDEC is currently operated on a volunteer basis by around 750 members primarily in the US and Canada.
Actively involved in IDEC operations since 2010, Orthel is looking forward to pursuing three priorities as president: continuing the association’s advocacy for the value of interior design education, centering sustainability in the profession and the curriculum, and at the same time foregrounding the ethics implicated in what might be mistaken for strictly aesthetic matters. “Students may begin by thinking that interior design is purely about aesthetics – and of course it inherently engages with aesthetics – but along the way they begin to understand the broader and immediate human implications of the decisions a designer can make.”
Among his own students at IU, Orthel witnesses that transformation regularly. “Sometimes it’s very personal and real,” Orthel said, “and sometimes it starts with recognizing the experience of somebody else.” A student will suddenly grasp the life-changing potential of design, for example, when a grandparent is trying to remain in their own home despite the challenges of aging.
Students gained a deeper appreciation for their field’s critical role at a recent talk on the potential of trauma-informed design for those experiencing homelessness by Florida State University professor Jill Pable. Orthel said that students were struck by Pable’s findings about the relatively large impact on shelter residents’ self-perception supported by small design decisions – such as the placement of the bathroom light fixture relative to the mirror.
Pable’s talk was an invocation of the ethics on which the discipline pivots. “It doesn’t matter whether you own your home, or you rent your home, or don’t currently have a physical home,” Orthel posited. “You are still a person.”
It is that recognition of our shared humanity that must drive interior design, Orthel insists. In his teaching, Orthel stresses the foundational role that empathy plays in our effort to keep improving the spaces in which we live, work, play, learn, and receive care. “We don’t design for ourselves,” he said. “I say this to my students all the time: we design for others. We have to know the code stuff, we have to know all these other aspects, but in the end, engaging with others, understanding others, supporting others, having empathy for others is core to what we need to be prepared for, because that’s why they come to us.”
Like a doctor, a firefighter, or a mayor, being an interior designer implies a commitment to the health, safety, and welfare of all people. But, as far as Orthel is concerned, complying with building codes only scratches the surface of that commitment.
“I joke with my students that building codes are not the goal, they’re the bare minimum. They’re the worst building that we can build. How can we do better? How can we actually make that building safer for people? How can we design and build a space that’s more accessible for people, that supports, for example, people with neurodiversity, that isn’t necessarily defined by code. That’s still about accessibility, that’s also about equity. Our students understand that there’s more than we can do.”
If enrollment numbers are any indication, students these days want to understand more about interior design in general. The number of students in the Eskenazi School’s interior design program has more than doubled in the last six years. It’s part of a national trend that Orthel attributes in part to the lifestyle shift prompted by the pandemic. “As people repurpose spaces and spend far more time in their interior spaces than they used to, they understand the value of these spaces to their well-being in perhaps a different way than they did 20 years ago.”
On top of its hundred-year history and distinguished faculty, what makes IU’s interior design program particularly appealing, Orthel said, is its placement within the Eskenazi School. Starting with the creative core classes that most Eskenazi students take, interior design students lean into their major, while availing themselves of other visual arts courses and facilities within the school. At the same time, Orthel adds, the breadth and depth of an R1 research institution "gives them the opportunity to make this degree about what they want their future to be.”
“We have students taking courses at Kelley, at O’Neill,” Orthel noted. “If they want to work internationally, IU is a fantastic place to come and learn language and cultural skills. Or if you want the classic liberal arts education, you can pair the strong design education with religious studies, or art history, or literature, and that’s going to prepare you to really understand how other people think, to see the world through the eyes of someone who experiences it differently from you do, and that’s an extraordinary preparation for the profession, to support people in the way they need to be.”
Orthel’s own foray into the field began in graduate school. Having earned his B. Arch at the University of Oregon, Orthel was pursuing a Master of Historic Preservation degree at the University of Kentucky when the director of the interior design program tapped him to teach interior design. He quickly came to realize he’d found his niche: “The way I think about design is inherently human-focused, and interiors is inherently human-focused.”
While teaching interiors there for three years, Orthel took a deep dive into the discipline with a cohort of mentors, then went on to pursue a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Design and History at Washington State University. He credits his mentors at Kentucky for recognizing and nurturing his potential as a design educator: “I’m deeply indebted to them,” he said. “There’s no way I would be where I am today if it hadn’t been for these people who cared passionately and understood why the next generation matters.”
Over the last six years at the Eskenazi School, Orthel has already incubated and hatched his own sizeable flock of designers. Stepping into the IDEC presidency over the next three years is another way of caring for the long-term health of the discipline and its practitioners. “My colleagues in IDEC share in this passion for making interior design better and helping our students be prepared for what they’re going to do in their careers.”
