Читать книгу Professional Practice for Interior Designers - Christine M. Piotrowski - Страница 91

The built‐environment industry increasingly involves cooperation, coordination, and collaboration with the various contingents of the industry. Interior designers coordinating with architects have been an ongoing collaboration. And interior designers working with vendors are another way professionals work together. Collaboration means, “the action of working with someone to produce or create something.”¹

It is very likely that your academic program includes coordinated projects with other programs on your campus. Even if there is no architecture or construction program at your institution, instructors can encourage collaboration with healthcare programs, business, environmental science, and the art department, to name a few. For example, a program that does not have an architecture program on campus could work with the college of business to design the spaces for the Elder Hostel program. The interior design students could provide space planning and product specification for that department as a class assignment. This exposure to collaboration is vital to the work that graduates will likely encounter in their professional lives.

A big part of integrated, collaborative practice involves understanding the language and terminology of related disciplines. Interior design course work already involves classes that introduce the student to the terminology of construction through classes in preparation of design drawings. Students interested in designing healthcare facilities could take introductory classes in the healthcare program to learn more about the field. Integrated design practices where multidiscipline teams work to find the best solution to the problems presented by clients is discussed in Chapter 15.

Technology makes collaboration much easier today than even 10 years ago. Although the Internet allowed for designers working remotely from each other to coordinate drawings and other documents for many years, the continued enhancement of technology and software options has broadened that cooperation. Telecommunication is not static but dynamic with video conferencing, use of cloud technology, and virtual reality. Live streaming of video conferences of designers in far‐flung locations enhances the opportunity to collaborate with firms anywhere in the world for clients anywhere in the world.

Collaboration also means cooperation and that cooperation may mean that some members of the group must acquiesce to ideas contrary to one individual's beliefs. Naturally, a leader will emerge from a group working on a collaborative project. But a good leader listens to all members and treats everyone's ideas fairly and not pushes the leader's ideas over everyone else.

The opportunity to work collaboratively continues to grow as firms join together as a joint venture or hybrid group to design large complex projects regardless of location. Although interior design for many years has been thought of as an individual seeking a solution to the client's problem, it has always been to some degree a collaborative process as members of the same office group work together to design both residential and commercial projects. Collaboration has grown dynamically as the necessity to working with other professionals creates opportunity to be involved in large projects that a small firm could not complete on its own. The individual designer must learn that cooperation and collaboration improve the professional success of everyone involved.