Interior Design helps students explore their inventive sides while providing instruction in architectural design; students come away with real-world lessons. “Interior Design helps students to improvise and improve their world,” teacher Cindy Peters said. “They discover ways that design influence their moods, environment and community.”

Peters studied Interior Design while pursuing her Home Economics degree and has been interested in it ever since. Her class is heavily project-based, with students involved in activities such as using different materials to recreate a magazine picture of an interior space and designing their own interior space. “The final project in Interior Design is the students creating, drawing and developing their own living room
and possibly bedroom design for a client they come up with,” Peters said. “Learn- ing how to accommodate their clients’ likes and dislikes, budget and needs helps the students become familiar with their own selves.”

The course taught sophomore Annalise Rozak how to lay out a room and create harmonious color schemes. “We learned how the aesthetics of a room can evoke certain emotions based on the color scheme, lines and symmetry,” Rozak said. “We also learned how to plan designs and draw room plans.” These skills help prepare students for real-life experiences and professions, not just the classroom. Rozak believes she has benefited from the lessons in the course. “It has prepared me for the professional world because we spent a lot of time in groups collaborating on planning projects which is common in many careers,” Rozak said. “The skills we learned in mapping are translatable to engineering profession, and the technique of balancing color is good practice for artwork.”

According to Rozak, the students become invested in their work and are inspired to create more room plans and projects. “It’s also very unusual because the students enjoy the projects so much that some will work on a project at home, even though there is never any homework,” Rozak said.