Building Cultural Competency in Interior Design: When Good Intentions go Awry

A local professional organization for interior designers issued a student design competition for a community cultural center to celebrate and teach others about a specific culture of the student’s choosing. Culture was broadly defined beyond race, nationality, religious, and social beliefs to include any group with shared interests. Students were encouraged to select a culture they might ‘admire’ and want to learn more about. The premise of the project was well intentioned, however the brief embodied outdated notions of culture and contained language which was arguably insensitive. Adding these issues to underlying problems of ‘pick-a-culture’ projects, my first inclination was to decline to participate. However, at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic exposed racial disparities in the US culture and economy, I recognized the critical importance of bringing conversations about race, privilege, stereotypes, appropriation, and advocacy into the classroom through reading, critique, and discussion. This paper raises multiple questions about the role of design, design education, and inclusion that surfaced through the project and identifies my own faults in the process. I question: who is allowed to design for ‘others’, was this an appropriate opportunity for minority students to use their own voice, and did I imbue my white guilt into the class? I will also discuss how the intention of design as problem-solving surfaced as power and privilege in conceptual development.