Commoning Interior Design Pedagogy

This paper is concerned with articulating the value of bringing commoning and spatial design pedagogy together. Developing a four-day intensive for the 130 first year interior design students to be held off-campus in the first two weeks of the students’ education became a space to explore this proposition. The purpose of the intensive was to encourage a supportive and robust student culture in and to introduce a more relational understanding of interior design and its capacity to effect social and spatial life early in their design studies. These pedagogical aims were framed and also addressed by commoning values that underpinned the design and delivery of the course work. The interior design studio classroom is particularly suited to teaching approaches guided by processes and frameworks of commoning. Commoning entails locating self-interest within broader interests that privilege the wellbeing and ecology of the community. Although more frequently understood as the processes that occur when people manage and maintain a shared resource, it can also apply to the relations that occur when people maintain a shared interest or project. The values encouraged by commoning processes mean that self-interest is located within broader interests that privilege the well-being and ecology of the community. These attitudes contrast with the prescribed activities and increasingly corporatised conditions preferred by neoliberalism within learning institutions. For these reasons and others, commoning is of specific use within the design classroom in that it produces learning through experience that can result in stronger political, social and critical perspective and develop other values for social-spatial design to those prescribed by commerce. The intensive aimed to encourage inclusive and emergent processes as a way of working together to introduce a more expansive view of the implications and experience of interiors, interior education and interior design. The interior design classroom studio becomes a space of engagement design with and guided by, processes of commoning.