Diverse Voices and Viewpoints: Rethinking Design Education

Nov 15, 2021 By IIDA HQ

Olivier Vallerand, Assoc. IIDA was named the 2021 Educator of the Year for guiding students to consider how design movements emerge from social, economic, and political contexts through exposure to marginalized communities and voices.

By IIDA HQ Nov 15, 2021

Annually, IIDA recognizes an educator for their forward-thinking approach to education and empowering students, as well as their commitment and dedication to the design community. These educators provide students with not only a strong foundation for their interior design education, but also open doors to new ways of thinking about, experiencing, and connecting with the industry as a whole.

IIDA’s 2021 Educator of the Year is Olivier Vallerand, Assoc. IIDA, and assistant professor at the School of Design of the University of Montreal. He holds a Ph.D. in architecture from McGill University and has held academic positions at Arizona State University (ASU), the School of Architecture and the Department of Art History in Université Laval, Québec, QC, and Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. While he currently keeps an installation-based practice, Olivier has practiced as a professional architect in various firms across the US and Canada including Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Quebec. His book Unplanned Visitors: Queering the Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Space was recognized by the Interior Design Educators Council for their 2021 Book Award.

Dr. Vallerand’s focus on alterity while creating healing spaces draws from his research and work on feminist and queer spaces, and forces students to face the sometimes challenging realities of inherent bias, and how designing with biases disenfranchises populations. This is evident in the way he approaches teaching the history of design, with a focus on the social, economical, and political conditions that influence the course of design and design schools rather than canonical figures and buildings.

Dr. Vallerand’s focus on alterity while creating healing spaces draws from his research and work on feminist and queer spaces, and forces students to face the sometimes challenging realities of inherent bias, and how designing with biases disenfranchises populations. This is evident in the way he approaches teaching the history of design, with a focus on the social, economical, and political conditions that influence the course of design and design schools rather than canonical figures and buildings.

In his courses, he has centered the immigrant and queer experience by collaborating with local community groups Circle the City and Trans Queer Pueblo to introduce students to the importance of considering cultural values and end-user experiences when designing healing environments. He also encourages cross-discipline collaboration through working with other departments, for the aforementioned projects focused on designing healing environments specifically, collaborating with a social work professor and graduate students, and in other instances architecture and urban planning students and instructors.

Unplanned Visitors: Queering the Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Space, Olivier Vallerand, 2020, Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

We asked Dr. Vallerand a few questions about his approach, and his legacy as an educator:

As an educator, what do you consider the most important thing to provide your students with?

I hope I can encourage students to develop tools that help think critically about the projects they will design, the people they are designing for, and the ways in which they can positively transform the structures within with they are working. I do not want students to think that designers are superheroes that can solve everything, but I hope students learn from my teaching that decisions they make always have a social and political impact... and that they can design beautiful spaces that are also socially sustainable and positively engaging their communities.

How does cross-disciplinary collaboration at the academic level help to enrich the education of interior design students beyond developing skills for working with teams of professionals?

In addition to my education as a designer, one of the most important experiences shaping my teaching and research is my involvement with LGBTQ groups. Not only has this led me to think about spaces beyond just their physical and material characteristics, but it has also opened up opportunities to be involved in research projects bringing together social workers, sociologists, sexologists, historians, etc. Through them, I have learned to look at spaces such as homeless shelters or retirement homes as sites of tremendous potential for interior designers - both students and professionals - to explore the breadth of the contributions to society we can make as a profession. Furthermore, these cross-disciplinary collaborations have also been for me opportunities to offer "real-life" projects as studio assignments, linking students' learning experience to experiences they might have outside of school.

Why do you find it important for students to consider design justice and anti-oppressive design—DEI within the practice of design/awareness of design biases—important to your curriculum?

Because we design spaces where people interact everyday, we have a responsibility to make these spaces safest as possible for everyone. Again, we are not superheroes and cannot solve every problem, but we can at least be aware of the issues and try to make positive change that address them. By exploring questions of personal and collective identity and their relation to design with my students, I hope to make them think about the ethical challenges of the work we do, about their responsibility to become agents of change that empower users and communities to themselves play a role in how their built environment is shaped.

What is the impact that you hope to have on the interior design industry through your work as an educator?

I hope I can contribute in at least a very small way in making the profession more inclusive, both in terms of who can become a designer and of who can access interior design services. And I hope my students go on to play an active role in their communities through an engagement with community organizations or as political figures. As experts in the built environment, we play an important role in shaping how society functions and we should thus be involved in shaping the laws and policies that govern the spaces we design.

Rachel Marie Frail, a student at ASU says that “He urges his students to acknowledge the identity of users and their unique physical and psychological needs...He introduced the ways that architecture could assist in social mobility, cultural diversity, and inclusion among users.”

At ASU, Dr. Vallerand co-taught a graduate-level Design Criticism class which looks at the application of critical methods to design as a form of material culture and human expression, and redesigned curriculum that has successfully drawn such a high number of non-major track students that they expect to see sustained growth in enrollment.

“I have witnessed Dr. Vallerand’s passion for the future of the interior design and interior architecture profession. He is a driven educator who is passionate about interior design and promoting our profession to non-design majors, and his excellence in teaching positively impacts our entire Interior Design program,” shared Diane M. Bender, Ph.D, associate professor, and program head of interior design at ASU.