Technology and Design Thinking: A Look at Interior Design Students’ Conceptualizations

The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore interior design students’ understanding of their design thinking, and to investigate how they view digital technology’s role in these activities. The research questions are: 1. How do interior design students conceptualize interior design as a discipline? 2. How do these students conceptualize their design process? 3. What value do students place on the “process book”1 as a representation of their design breadth and depth in a given project? 4. How do students view computer technology’s role in their design thinking and their design products? Participants viewed interior design as more sensitive to the human condition than architecture. AutoCAD was one software package that was used both in the process and the end product, but other more common software programs (word processors, spreadsheets) were only minimally utilized. Hypermedia and databases were not mentioned by any participants as tools in their design processes.