Opening the “Black-Box” of Interior Design Education: The Assessment of Basic Design Project Work

Interior design education differs from education in other disciplines due to its use of design studio as the setting for project based reflective learning environment. This setting is criticized for being a pedagogy derived from a preexisting ‘apprenticeship’ model that reproduces prevalent and dominant notions of “architectural habitus.” This paper carries out a case study on the first year basic design course of 26 interior architecture students in Turkey over one semester to discuss how “thinking like an architect” has been transmitted by critics to the new members of the profession.