Laura Cole, Ph.D., IDEC

Assistant Professor and Interor Design Program Coordinator
University of Missouri, Columbia

Expertise/Specializations/Interests: public green building literacy, green buildings for STEM education, sustainabile interiors and place attachment

What is the highest and best purpose of interior design?

To elevate the human spirit, and all human spirits, while honoring the non-human nature that shares our home on planet earth.

More than once, I have thought about leaving interior design. As a professional working for an interior design giant, the thrill of designing gorgeous, branded environments gave way to the dark side of the industry: extractive, soul-crushing environmental destruction. Our interiors were meant to make large clients wealthier and were quickly “thrown away” when trends changed. Capitalism was not a framework I considered at the time, but I can now identify it as the push force. I left practice and hid in the industry-blind luxuries that a doctoral education provides. I emerged an interior design educator. But the industry I am preparing my students for has not changed much. The questions that swirl in my mind: How do we teach “enough-ism,” regenerative design thinking, and social justice for an industry that is dominantly additive, wasteful and profit-driven? Looking into the distant ecological future, will interior design be a fading luxury of the oil age? What is our role in a deeply de-carbonized society?

I’m honestly not sure what our industry will look like in 60 years when the ocean begins to swallow Miami. But I’m certain that the act of crafting interior spaces that support the human soul will endure as long as we do. We can treat non-human nature as co-inhabitants of spaceship earth. As healers, organizers, and creative problem solvers, we can transition to a profession that supports what it means to live well – socially and psychologically -- on a planet with finite resources. Incremental progress in this direction is my personal compass and the one of the highest purposes I can imagine for interior design. And also the reason I am still here.