Making a Scene: Independent, intercultural and industry-led making strategies at Dundee

How interior education conceptualises and anticipates the environmental experiences of users has always been, in the view of the author, paradoxical and somewhat ironic. Though fixated with the ‘built’, lived experiences of users we tend not to ‘build’ per-se but to fabricate; to both ‘build’ and to ‘lie’. But making, in some ways, needs to be rethought and remade if it’s to be capable of intellectually and creatively transforming interior pedagogy. There’s never been a more opportune moment for new making strategies to act both as a catalyst and as a counterpoint to the digital dependencies affecting society, influencing our student’s, who, as generational ‘mosaic thinkers’, often tend to make meaning out of fragments, whilst also being mindful of the digital contingencies in industry. The question is how do we navigate these compelling contradictions at a time of deep transformational change in education, dwindling resources and increasing pressures to comply, rather than critique, industry? This proposal will describe a range of making strategies linked to an undergraduate interior programme involving individual projects, international collaborations and industry funded making. Examples discussed include emotive-making strategies at the sculptural / object–scale; at full-scale reflecting Socratic dialogue methods for installations, and for industry funded HABLabs which reflect mise-en-scène principles. The author will provide an overview of these examples and relate these to place-based-prototyping approaches in research, practice, museums and the arts