Calling it a "historic opportunity" AIA President Gordon Chong, FAIA; International Interior Design Association (IIDA) President Cary Johnson, FIIDA; and American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) President Barbara Nugent, FASID, welcomed attendees from all three organizations to the Interior Design Panel Discussion May 10. The three presidents discussed the importance of collaboration between their respective memberships. In fact, Chong told the audience, despite his strict and overstuffed schedule, he broke it to attend this one convention seminar.

As the genesis of this particular session, Chong explained, representatives from the AIA, IIDA, and ASID had come together in June 2001 to talk about similarities among the organizations' challenges and goals. Using these similarities, they formed two concrete goals for the three organizations to work on in a collaborative effort.

Development and dissemination: The first goal is knowledge development and dissemination. Working as a team, the group hopes to gather information pertinent to all members of the design profession. "We want to build on what we already have instead of duplicating," said Nugent. She noted several relevant publications, including those detailing the future of the profession and others about recruiting and retaining people into the design professions.

The next step in achieving this goal is to create a Web site for designers and design- related professionals. Plans for the site include a searchable database of resources ranging from scholarly journals to general press publications and would be written in a "common language" understandable to all design-related practitioners. A major undertaking, the site is still in the early construction phase and promises to be a great resource in the future. "This is what collaboration is all about," Nugent stressed.

Public awareness: The second goal for the group is public awareness. Johnson breaks this goal into two categories: changing the perception of design and building a new perception of design. Overall, this goal is about education, with the intent to educate all students, from the child beginning kindergarten to the graduate student.

The team is working toward programs that will not so much teach design as introduce students to the importance of design in their everyday lives. Their research has yielded grants available for this type of program implementation in schools.

Integrating design into the business schools, primarily at the graduate level, makes up the second half of the public awareness goal. The team hopes to educate business students on the importance of design in their future careers. They would like to target future CEOs and CFOs and teach them that "good design is good business."

This collaboration of AIA, IIDA, and ASID members will continue to work towards these goals for the future of the design profession. As Chong concluded, "We have a clear understanding of the issues and that is a first step."

Copyright 2002 The American Institute of Architects. All rights reserved.