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Cornell Professor Launches Interior Design Naming Practice

To date, the project has named nearly 70 interior archetypes.

by John Lamson -- Interior Design, 8/24/2009 12:00:00 AM

In the late 1990’s, professor Jan Jennings struggled to talk with her interior design students about design practices that had been used throughout history and across cultures, such as a dramatic staircase in the lobby of a luxury hotel, two similar chairs situated side-by-side in a large space, or columns in a restaurant ornamented by decorative means. For decades—even centuries, in some cases—these reiterative examples have gone unnamed and undocumented.

Today, Jennings, a professor in Design and Environmental Analysis, leads a multidisciplinary research team of faculty from the Colleges of Human Ecology, Arts and Sciences, and Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University in building a new knowledge base for the creative dimension of design. The project is the first of its kind to assemble contemporary design theory in a searchable, online database that includes imagery from real buildings.

“We had to invent a naming practice, a vocabulary for students to use in talking about design,” Jennings said. “Interior design had borrowed language from architecture and visual arts, but when you came down to it, we didn’t have a typology for contemporary design practices that have been occurring across history, style, and culture.”

Today, that original concept is a full-blown research and teaching project called Intypes, which is short for the Interior Archetypes Research and Teaching Project. The project officially launched this summer at the NeoCon World’s Trade Fair in Chicago with partners Interior Design magazine and IIDA.

“This extraordinary undertaking, 13 years in the making, is sure to invigorate the educational process by creating a new vocabulary to define contemporary design,” said Cindy Allen, editor in chief of Interior Design.

"The project brings the field of interior design to a whole new level," said Cheryl Durst, executive vice president and CEO of IIDA. “The Intypes approach gives credence and relevance to the history and legacy of interior design as a profession, as a discipline and as a viable and vital contribution to society as a whole.”

To date, the project has named nearly 70 interior archetypes. “Some of our alumni are using these words in the field,” Jennings said. “When they do that, they hear the word being used later by their colleagues. If the word is used without translation or definition, then it really has become a word that contributes to a design language.”

In total, four faculty members and 16 interior design master’s students have actively participated in the project. Many of the students take on a market segment, such as health care, for their thesis projects, researching the history, cultural implications, and use. Their proposals go to the Intypes Research Group, which evaluates the research and considers the students’ proposed names.

The Intypes workgroup is hoping their project inspires designers to think about these issues, and opens the door to more formal research in interior design. “Interior design is its own field and profession,” Jennings said. “We’re hoping the project provides a new way to talk about field and lends it the credibility it deserves.”

Images courtesy of Cornell University.