Creating Inclusive Interior Spaces That Celebrate Diversity

Okay, welcome back. We are going to dive into culturally sensitive design, and this is Designing for Inclusive Spaces. Now, culturally sensitive interior design, what does it mean? Well, culturally aware interior design basically focuses on developing environments that acknowledge and respect the varied cultural values, beliefs, and traditions of people in the community that will occupy the space, and it may be beyond the community.

It also involves recognizing and integrating features that represent and celebrate their background, fostering inclusivity, and give a sense of belonging, right? Culturally sensitive design allows the culture to feel comfortable, or any culture to feel comfortable inside a space that you've designed. So, let's look at some principles. Principles for creating inclusive spaces where anyone feels welcome.

First of all, inclusive design is creating environments that accommodate the requirements and desires of a variety of different individuals, and this includes those with a disability or with a very distinct cultural background, right? Another principle is we want to avoid stereotypes, right? Recognizing possible biases and reframe from making broad assumptions. We can't assume that we know everything about each culture that's out there. We have to do our research, and we can do this before applying our design strategy.

The third principle dives into understanding culture, and this again requires research, investigating, and gaining knowledge about the history, the traditions, the practices, the social conventions of the intended audience. Remember when we talked in the first couple lessons, we were talking about getting to know your client and understanding their cultural background, because that can be used to create a concept for whatever space you're doing the interior design for. And with this, we can add respectful design choices, which is integrating cultural aspects of genuine colors, textures, materials, while also adapting and using flexibility, right? So, designing environments that can be readily adjusted to support various cultures.

Now, the last one is communication and collaboration, right? So, integrating, or excuse me, interacting with individuals from the target culture to obtain perspectives and input during the design process. Again, we already talked about collaborating with the client. This sometimes means collaborating with the individuals that will be in the space, right? So, a big firm like Gensler, who's designed so many projects around the world, before they design an airport, they go and interview the passengers.

And so, some of these fantastic airports that have been designed, they ask the passengers, what is it that you need, right? And a lot of them said, I just need a place to sit down and charge my phone or to rest. And now you'll notice that airports are coming up with more creative ways to incorporate these ideas. And this is from understanding the clientele and understanding who's going to be using the space.

And I think it's important to think about that as an interior designer. You may be a project manager for a housing project, and that housing project may have a variety of different cultures and backgrounds that are going to be living there. So, how do you design that complex to accommodate all of these cultures? And there are a variety of ways and strategies to do this.

And fortunately, there are hundreds of wonderful case studies out there of projects that really are so universal that any cultural type will have the same wonderful experience in the design or the architecture environment that you've created. So, just some things to think about. Here's a wonderful example of kind of revealing the culture of the identity of maybe the restaurant, right? So, you can see the texture, all the elements we learned in the previous lessons, you know, the textures, the color, the symbols, everything in here starts to say and speak specifically to the culture that we're designing for, regardless of what that culture is, right? So, each client is different, right? If you're designing an Indian restaurant versus designing a Japanese restaurant, you're likely going to consider the cultural needs and the background of those clients who will be running that restaurant so that the restaurant has a sense of identity, right? And this just adds to the beauty of what we do as interior designers is that not one project is the same.

They're all unique, and every single project is unique, every client is unique, and guess what? The individuals that experience the space are also unique. But we might intentionally want the people visiting this restaurant to experience a specific culture, and you as the interior designer can research that, talk to the client, and understand what that is so that you can design for it. There are so many amazing technologies that are happening, and now with AI and the movement with artificial intelligence, there's medical translation technology, and there's ways that we have technology that can be translated in 200 different languages, and we have spaces that can be used by a variety of individuals, regardless of where they are culturally from or what their background is.

And so, with this technology, we have the ability to really think about cultural sensitivity and design interior environments that really think about all of these aspects. Now, you may have heard of a smart home, and a smart home is great when it relates to both universal design and cultural sensitivity because smart homes use smart technology to power the home's electricity, to power some electronics. Nowadays, there are systems that have, if you have, let's say, a shading device, there's a remote control that allows the shading device to go up and down easily, so it's low physical effort.

You don't have to grab the curtain rod and pull up and down or to get something. You have lights that are automatic. Now we have Alexa, we have Siri, who can turn on the lights for us, right? So, imagine if you're an individual that may have some sort of disability, how helpful a smart home system could be for you, right? And if it's, hey, Siri, turn on the lights, or, you know, you have an automatic timer on certain things that controls your day lighting strategies, or your artificial lighting, or even how or when you lock the doors.

I mean, there are so many wonderful technologies out there that can really make life easier, right? Yes, it's cool, and the AI technology is amazing, but at the same time, it's used intentionally to make, you know, these spaces very usable by anyone, right? And a lot of times we'll design for residential design, we'll do what's called aging in place, which means we design the residence for the client, but we design it in a way that anticipates that they're going to age over time, which means as they get older, if there may be some sort of disability that develops over the course of, you know, 10 or 20 years, the house can accommodate that, and it's already set up to do that, you know, an accessible shower that allows an individual to roll in. We had a project where we did an interior renovation, and we adjusted the bathroom so that it was completely ADA accessible, you know, because my grandmother was in a wheelchair at that time, and it was amazing what she could do in those spaces that everyone else could do just as easily, and so nowadays, home technology and AI is getting smarter, and we can use this as interior designers. In the next video, I'll be going over your final project, and I'm excited, and I will see you there.