Abstract

Interior designers focus a significant amount of their time working on the development of volumetric design solutions that create the interior architectural spaces within buildings. Design students communicate their design ideas through the use of scaled drawings and models that do not provide full scale spaces to experience. It is critically important for designers to be able to accurately visualize the designs they develop because it is only when the design is complete, that the space can be fully experienced. Educational design exercises that focus on experiential learning methods provide students with opportunities to not only analyze the building shells they are designing within, but also to study existing spaces that are similar to the ones they are designing. The experiences of interacting with, evaluating, and also contemplating design ideas within actual or similar spaces provide a direct full scale spatial representation. These experiences can then be directly applied as they learn to visualize their design ideas during the design development stages. This paper will explore experiential learning, its application to interior design pedagogy, and several experiential learning modules that have been utilized to support spatial design visualization strategies.