Community-building through interior design education

Through a philosophy of community engagement in educational programs, interior design can reaffirm its social compact and embrace its multiple birthrights in home economics, art, architecture, and industrial design. Corser suggests five principles and practices as important to a successful design engagement approach: acknowledging mutual value and values; redefining problems and opportunities; mutually defining success, failure, and risk; creating and renewing structures for communication; and getting serious about feedback, evaluation, and reflection. This chapter offers two case-study examples of community engagement projects. The focus of the first case study is social justice and serves to highlight how students became sensitized to social justice issues after participating in a community engagement project. Underpinning this project are Corser's three principles of (1) mutual value, (2) the creation of communication structures, and (3) reflection. The second case study offers a more fully engaged community project and exemplifies all five of Corser's principles.