?interior, practices of interiorization, interior designs
Creators: name: Attiwill, Suzie
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330108
subject: Interior design

description: This PhD was undertaken as an opportunity to address and reinvent a practice involving exhibition design, curation and writing situated within the discipline of interior design.

The motivation for the research was the prevalence of assumptions in relation to ‘interior’ and how – even though it is designed – the term ‘interior’ is rarely posed as a creative problematic. One of the main objectives of the PhD was, and continues to be, to open up ‘interior’, to encourage different ways of thinking and designing interiors, and through this to contribute to the emerging discourse and practice of interior design.

Two questions have moved with the research. The formal PhD research question posed at the beginning: ‘if one shifts from Cartesian and phenomenological concepts of object/subject relations, then what kind of interior(s) become actualised?’ And a question connected with ‘interior’ – more of a tacit question engaged with by the practice and one which surfaced through the research with the question shifting from what? to when? where?, how? and which? – from interior? to ?interior. 

These questions were posed through projects and practices of exhibition, curating, writing, craft, design and teaching. Here, exhibitions and other projects were experiments. Experiments not in a deductive way where a set of parameters were established beforehand and then tested. Instead they were experiments as a process of production engaged with the experiential world – materials, forces, chance, constraints – to see what can happen, what I can do and what can be said and seen. Ideas from Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz and Michel Foucault were picked up and used as tools for thinking and doing.

The desire to shift from phenomenological and Cartesian modes of subject-object relations necessitated an engagement with philosophical thinking. The PhD has been an apprenticeship in a thinking which has grappled with a need to address issues of certainty, knowledge, truth and subjectivity in relation to practice, research and the concept of interior. This apprenticeship has enabled a way of positioning research through practice that values experimentation, experience and expression. It has also led to a philosophy defined through an interior design practice. This is different to current approaches that attempt to theorize the discipline. This training enables an understanding of how to engage interior design practice as creative research and, through this, foster research in relation to the discipline.

?interior, practices of interiorization, interior designs offers up ways of thinking and practising interior that contributes to the discipline of interior design by opening up and inviting new ways of thinking and practising. 

?interior is more of a proposition than an answer to a question, a posing of interior where the invitation is to attend to it as a design, as a question in relation to practise which as a creative problematic needs to be addressed each time anew; to place the question of ?interior in the world; to open it up to the exterior/outside.