Julie Barfuss McHood, NCIDQ, IIDA, SCCID

Interior Designer
Veteran Affairs Medical Center, Salt Lake City

Expertise/Specializations/Interests: commercial interior design, facilities and institutional, healthcare design, human health and wellbeing

What is the highest and best purpose of interior design?

As a healthcare designer, I find myself defaulting to “creating healing environments”, but I actually think that it is definitely a much broader purpose. While the end result for my healthcare design is exactly that, it also involves creating a safe space that is also an aesthetically pleasing, healing space. If I can make an analogy, I think Interior design can be correlated to “visual grammar” – we use lines, shapes, color, space, texture, scale as the building blocks of our “visual communication”. When we use good grammar in our communication we include the structure and delivery of our words (both written and spoken) to affectively communicate with others. How well we employ good grammar affects how we are perceived or “experienced” by others. Likewise, good “visual grammar” will impact how a space is experienced. Having a strong foundation of the core elements of design and then knowing how and when to employ those principles appropriately will provide an experience that impacts the user, ideally in a positive, healing way.