Designing with Purpose through Sustainable Materials and Responsible Interior Practices

Welcome to Lesson 7, Introduction to Interior Design. You've made it through the course and I'm excited to share with you our final lesson that will talk about sustainable measures and how to be responsible as an interior designer. We'll talk about some sustainable strategies and materials.

We'll give specific examples of these materials. We'll talk about environmental strategies with both interior designers and architects utilize while creating interior design. We'll also look at social responsible design and I'll dive deeper into the new age of where interior design is going and how we design for people.

Let's get started. All right, to start off with sustainable interior design materials. There's a number of different sustainable materials that we can talk about.

One of them is the idea of utilizing recycled materials. These are materials that have been repurposed and given a second life. You may have heard the term recycle.

What are some of these materials? Well, it could be glass and literally glass bottles have been used to create stained glass or other features of a building. Plastic. Plastic can be recycled and plastic bags can also be used to actually create furniture, believe it or not.

Metal is recyclable and scrap metal can be repurposed to form interior partitions and walls to create the interior design of the building. And wood can also be reclaimed or recycled. And it's used for all sorts of aspects of interior design, including flooring and wall paneling.

And we also have fabrics. Fabrics make up the surface material of the furnishings that we select inside the space. But fabrics can also be used, especially recycled jeans can be used to actually create building insulation.

They have acoustic properties that are very valuable. So a lot of the materials that we use in everyday life can technically be recycled and given a second life. Now, we also have renewable materials when we're speaking about sustainable interior design.

Renewable materials are sustainable choices as these materials can be refilled or replaced as needed. Three examples of this is, number one, cork. Now, cork is derived from the oak tree bark, a cork oak tree bark.

And it provides an environmentally friendly solution for, let's say, flooring and insulation. That's how we could apply this to interior design. Bamboo.

Bamboo is a material that's self-regenerating. It's a grass and it grows quickly and can be used for everything from panels, flooring, to even furnishings. We also have organic cotton, excuse me.

And organic cotton can be used for textiles and it can be created without any harmful pesticides. You'd be surprised how typically materials are created and a lot of time there's particles or there's pesticides that are inside these materials. Organic cotton is a great sustainable choice if you want to assure that there are no toxic or pesticides inside those materials.

And that leads me to non-toxic materials. The sustainable use of materials that do not emit any kind of dangerous chemicals or pollutants into the air. A big one that you'll hear in the industry is non-VOC paints.

Now, over the last few years, this has gotten better. There was at one point a low VOC, which still had volatile organic compounds in it, but now paints are coming standard with absolutely no volatile organic compounds, which is harmful to the human health. Linen is also a non-toxic material and linen is organic and it's pest resistant.

It's a fabric that's derived from the flax plant. You may have also heard of hemp. Hemp is a material used for carpets, drapes, upholstery, and this requires minimal water and pesticides to create.

And number four, we have natural stone and natural stone is a sustainable extraction process. It has the ability to span an extremely long life and the material lasts for many, many, many years. So again, recycled materials, renewable materials, and non-toxic materials are choices that we make as interior designers in the industry.

Now, let's look at some samples. What you're looking at here is actually an example of reclaimed wood being used to create light fixture design. Now, for every tree taking down, there's typically a number of trees that are seeded so that they can grow.

But with the trees that we utilize, we can actually create furniture and lighting elements that are pretty fascinating. And I think this image goes to show that if we've recycled wood or wood's no longer being used, a lot of times the building will be demolished and we'll salvage all of that wood so that we can recycle it and reclaim it for a different life. Look at this example.

This example uses cork and the advantage of cork is number one, it's soft, and number two, off of its sustainable materials, it's great for children. And so play areas can utilize cork. It's a very environmental friendly material and it's soft to the touch, which does what? It minimizes accidents, right? And when a child is playing, we want to make sure that the material that they're playing on is very soft.

So here's an application of applying another sustainable material. Now, when we talked about the VOCs, right, the volatile organic compounds, it's important to understand that these VOCs can actually harm both short term and have long term health effects. And this includes irritating eyes, nose, throat, headaches, loss of coordination, nausea, damage, even liver and kidney disease has been linked.

We've even seen cases where there's been cases of cancer that has been tied to the VOC levels in particular materials. So studies have shown that VOC levels are typically much higher up to 10 times indoors than outdoors, which makes it even more important for us to make sustainable choices, right? So the next time you're shopping as an interior designer and you're looking for those paints, make sure you've got a certified seal that says no VOC. And when considering the time we spend indoors at work, recreation, especially at home, it becomes apparent that minimizing exposure to these volatile organic compounds is essential for not only comfort, but for everyday life.

And this has now become a standard in the industry. And again, you look for the seal. And if the seal is valid, you've got a paint that has no VOCs.

Now, here is an example of using no VOC paint in an area or a designed room here. But I also want to point out that the combination of all of these aspects we've talked about, and not just in this lesson, we're talking about sustainability here, but the aspects of lighting, the aspects of color, interior design truly has, it has the capability of improving health and wellness. So just looking at daylighting, you could see the window with the light coming through.

Daylighting has already been proven to increase serotonin levels in the brain. And if daylight increases serotonin in the brain, that means that it naturally makes us happy. If daylight can cause happiness and increase serotonin, why are we not using more daylight, especially in areas like hospitals or medical facilities? Right? So interior designers truly have an opportunity to work with sustainability and to work with paints and materials and make decisions that are smart, good for the environment, and have the ability to actually increase or, you know, support our health and wellness.

Great job, everyone. In the next video, we'll discuss environmental strategies related to sustainability.