Planning is a cornerstone of designing interior spaces, yet the complexity of planning to predict and accommodate the future actions, behaviours, and needs of would-be occupants is rarely resolved. In 1978, Robin Evans showed us that the ‘moral geography’ of the plan had a mercurial relationship with the composition of interior spaces and that the ordinary, unassuming, and unexamined elements of domestic interiors change in time to reflect our emergent social values. At the same time, Manfredo Tafuri’s analysis of the endless interiors in Piranesi’s Il Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma ichnographia engraving showed us that the unprescribed interpretation of the plan was the only way to surpass the well-intentioned mistakes of functional and utopian idealism.

The 2025 issue of Idea Journal sought contributions that explored the history, theory, practice, and futures of unplanned interiors. In opposition to the aesthetic idealisation of interior compositions in the commercial contexts of department stores, lifestyle magazines, and presentation drawings, it asked authors to consider the un-ideal interior. How do interior spaces work in ways that are unplanned, unforeseen, and unintended? What do instances of human action exceeding the prescriptive ideas of the plan tell us about who we are, our emergent social and moral values, and where these values are going? In the contexts of rising climate and political uncertainty, what is the significance of agility, temporality, and openness to change needed for new approaches to interior planning?

Authors were encouraged to use text-based research essays to offer new knowledge on how unplanned interiors reflect the social and cultural conditions of their time. They were also invited to use image-based research essays to respond to, comment on, and convey ideas of unplanned spatial practices.

In both the research and practice of spatial design, unbuilt projects are often occluded by those that eventuate in built form. Unable to deliver genuine qualities of spatial experience, the intangibility of unbuilt interiors can be relegated to the status of ‘never was’, ‘never made it’, ideas on backup hard drives, in discarded plan drawers, and ageing materials studies.

Yet, unbuilt projects frequently foreground the ideological, cultural, and political motivations that undergird their conception. Unencumbered by municipal regulations, costs, and compromises, unbuilt interiors can maintain the breathtaking ideas that are too often redacted, conceded, or simply forgotten by the time a design physically manifests.

From the interior worlds of Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Cenotaph for Isaac Newton (1784) to Superstudio’s critique of hyper-modern domesticity in Supersurface, The Happy Island, Project (1971), unbuilt interiors have the capacity to challenge existing power and political constructs by uniquely contributing unassailed opinions. Instruments of persuasion, they expand discourse on the social impacts of spatial design in ways their built compeers cannot.

Conversely, the persuasive power of unbuilt projects can be used to diminish critiques of the status quo. Hyper-realistic renders and the emergence of compelling AI imagery prime our desires to consume unbuildable images of interior luxury and grandeur. Global inflation and supply chain disruptions continue to entrench concerns about the unbuildable within aspirations of home ownership and status, impacting the values and structures of domestic occupation for those who can afford it and those who cannot.

The 2024 issue of idea journal sought contributions that explore the history, theory, practice, and futures of unbuilt interiors. In expanded discourses on the social impacts of spatial design, authors were asked to consider what role archived, artificial, and unachievable designs have on the ideological, cultural, and political contexts of their times.

In 1981, architect Nigel Coates described London's underground clubs as spaces that wilfully induce delirium. Introducing ideas of obscurity, uncertainty and the unknown into his analysis of these interior environments, Coates suggested that their darkened spaces disintegrated the certainty of walls and physical limitations. Instead, clubs enabled the inhabitants to cultivate each interior as an event — spaces made from the murky, intermingled experiences of London’s youth and the ‘dress-up box add-on aesthetic’ of their art-as-fashion lifestyles. Coates's comments heralded a decade of experimentation with interior environments that blurred disciplinary boundaries between art, design and fashion practices, and introduced ideas of shock, contradiction, fragmentation and ambiguity into interior planning, their drawings, and their performances.

This issue of idea journal: Uncertain Interiors sought theoretical, historical, and experimental analyses on the concept of uncertainty in interior environments. Uncertainty is often considered an undesirable quality, a transgression from normative behaviours and functions. Yet, uncertainty is inherent to critical and creative practices of spatial design. It underpins the complex experience inhabitants make with interior space beyond the designer's intention. History is replete with spectacular examples of designs, drawings and spatial practices that embrace the unknown to surpass the predictive, authoritative and determined limitations of their space-planning and programming.

Conversely, recent global events have plagued every aspect of daily life with the impact of uncertainty. Our ecological, economic, political and social spheres now compound instances of unanticipated, and sometimes devastating, change. Fear of uncertainty reveals the latent entrenchment of positivist and conservative values that limit our capacity to adapt with speed, flexibility and agility. Yet, if spatial designers embrace an uncertain relativism altogether, then what claims can they make to predict the real and material impact their work has on social change, political action, and environmental stewardship?

Recognising the significant and complex capacity of uncertainty to disrupt normative practices of design and inhabitation, authors were encouraged to address ideas of uncertain interiors for this journal issue in text-based and image-based research essays.

While the world reels, reconfigures, and recovers from the drama and trauma of 2020, wishing to thwart the effects of grief and comprehend what was once incomprehensible, there is all good reason to turn our imagination to ‘what ifs’, dreams, and other speculations as an antidote to hopelessness. This issue calls for contributions that consider the unlikely, improbable or downright impossible in spatial design. In recent history, fictions, fantasies and fabulations have offered productive opposition to the rampant instrumentality of pragmatism and functional planning. Their impact has instilled optimism, sparked alternative visions, and been sites of countless critiques of conformity and the status quo. Loosely defined impulses towards the unrealisable and the most illogical of things approached in the most logical of ways have led to unparalleled episodes of creativity in drawings, poems and material production. From Piranesi, Peter Greenaway, Kurt Schwitters, Dora Maar, Hans Op de Beeck, Ursula Le Guinn, John Hejduk, to Daniel Libeskind, explorations of the impossible have led to new interpretative frontiers that move the limits of interiority and spatial practices. Lest we not forget or become complacent with the contributory and often unrecognised impact of contemporary social media, advertisement, and technological surveillance that continues to shape interior worlds, experiences, and values. In many ways, there is as much focus on unpacking, making sense of and disproving the dangerous impacts of fictions, fantasies and fabulations as there is on setting the scene for dreams and magical realities.

This issue recognises the complex story of fictions, fantasies and fabulations in spatial design, not as counter-productive forces, but as the necessary counter-balances which offer liberty from convention, propriety, and rational assumptions about behaviour, space, time, and material—the core elements of interior worlds. Far from retreating into solipsistic escapism, fictions, fantasies and fabulations serve as crucialsites for speculative invention, futuring, and critical reflection. Resistant to the reductive inertia of pragmatism, these generative properties reign in that mercurial shadow world of meaning and value not directly associated with cause and effect.

The issue is intended to frame an open examination and exploration of the fictions, fantasies and fabulations in spatial and interior practices. It prompts us to draw, write, perform and record the critical edge of the unrealisable in an era that has literally experienced the limits of reason. As described by poet Franny Choi, there is no more time for poetry without stakes because ‘people are literally dying.’ There is no more time for creative practices that don’t ask questions that we ‘truly don’t know the answer to.’ Choi’s sentiments air a sense of urgency for relevance as much as they point to the value and agency of poetic meaning and making in artistic, spatial and interior practices.

(Extra) Ordinary Interiors called for contributions from academics, research students and practitioners that demonstrate contemporary modes of criticality and reflection on specific interior environments in ways that expand upon that which is ordinary (of the everyday, common, banal, or taken for granted).

This theme has two agendas: First, the desire to amplify critical reflection as a key practice of the disciplines associated with this journal’s readership. In short, to prompt interior designers, interior architects, and spatial designers to be more proactive and experimental in asserting their specialist knowledge and expertise as critical commentary. This asks authors to reconsider the role of critique and criticism in their scholarly and creative works, or, to demonstrate how to reflect critically upon a design and to locate the design’s relation to material, political, social, cultural, historical and geographical concerns. Such an enterprise may reveal whether models of criticality centred on judgement, authority and historicism are relevant, constructive, insightful or generative, or, as Bruno Latour poses, have they ‘run out of steam’? This exercise may prompt some to revisit key thinkers who pose new discursive, visual and temporal models for critical practice in this recent age of criticality. We draw your attention to Critical Spatial Practice by Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen, which asks for thinking “about ‘space’ without necessarily intervening in it physically, but trying to sensitise, promote, develop and foster an attitude towards contemporary spatial production, its triggers, driving forces, effects and affects... [to] speculate on the modalities of production and potential benefits of the role of ‘the outsider.’”

The second agenda of this journal issue takes heed of the ordinary, and how, in its intense observation, what is normal or often taken for granted exceeds itself, becomes extra or more ordinary. Everyday spaces such supermarkets, service stations, laundry mats, hardware stores, parks and four-way street intersections, and banal gestures such as washing the dishes, walking the dog or street sweeping become subject to critical scrutiny and introspection. Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room, Julio Cortázar’s Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves are but a few historic examples that draw out critical depth and aesthetic meaning about ordinary interiors, interiors understood in the most liberal sense. What new actions to the crisis of critical commentary lurk restlessly in ordinary interiors?

Significantly advanced from presentations delivered at the Body of Knowledge 2019 conference, each article in this special guest edited idea journal issue focusses on the interdisciplinary intersections, connections and findings across research practices that involve art and theories of cognition. In particular, articles emphasise how spatial art and design research approaches have enabled the articulation of a complex understanding of environments, spaces and experiences, which may also involve the spatial distribution of cultural, organisational and conceptual structures and relationships, as well as the surrounding design features. 

Contributions explore: 

- How do art and spatial practices increase the potential for knowledge transfer and celebrate diverse forms of embodied expertise? 

- How do the examination of cultures of practice, Indigenous knowledges and cultural practices offer perspectives on inclusion, diversity, neurodiversity, disability and social justice issues? 

- How the art and spatial practices may contribute to research perspectives from contemporary cognitive neuroscience and the philosophy of mind? 

- The dynamic between an organism and its surroundings for example: How does art and design shift the way knowledge and thinking processes are acquired, extended and distributed? 

- How art and design practices demonstrate the ways different forms of acquiring and producing knowledge intersect? 

Interior Technicity: Unplugged and/ or Switched On invited reflection on how interiors have always been augmenting entities and how they continue to be so—in other words, extending, facilitating and consolidating bodies within socio-cultural environments. Rather than seeing an interior as an ‘inside’ in opposition to a world beyond, it asked what modes of ‘folding inward’ have equipped and enabled the spatial environment? Technicity—the world of tools and technical objects that extend and mediate memory, as Bernard Steigler (1998) describes it—has never been what inside-ness, in its sheltering of life, keeps at bay; mediation is from the start technical, indexed to inscribing practices rich in temporal and embodied implications. By this reading, interiors have always been augmented and augmenting (in the sense of the Latin “augmentare”: to increase, enlarge, or enrich).

This idea journal issue considers this mode of ‘folding inward’ as a condition of an interior’s specificity. Whether it be a small structure such as a tramping hut or a tiny house, a large complex interior environment such as an airport or shopping mall, handmade with local materials such as Somoan fale, or the result of manufacturing processes assembling artificial and pre-fabricated elements as in the case of a space craft, boat or train, interiors are augmented, mediated, generated or embellished by technologies. The effect of these technologies is not neutral; one’s experience of an interior is significantly influenced by the affective resonance of its technologies.

This edition of the IDEA Journal: DARK SPACE_the interior called for interdisciplinary collaborative discourse examining built or unbuilt projects/speculations/theoretical inquiry/design inquiry, positioned as:

          - Disruption to the realities and perceptions of (interior?) space

          - Interiors that catalyse symbioses (interior exterior)

          - Extreme interiors that confront the human sensorium

          - Experimental Interiors that manipulate the human sensorium

          - Historical precedents of Interiors that engage the human sensorium

          - Future projections of Interiors that are affecting/shifting changing the human sensorium

          - Physiological and or psychological analyses of Interiors that affect symbioses.

Unprecedented movements of people, growth in population density and forces of capitalism and globalism shape the twenty-first century urban environment and transform how people live in the world – spatially, temporally and subjectively. In the disciplines of interior design, interior architecture, architecture, spatial design and urban design, one encounters the coupling of the conditions of ‘urban’ and ‘interior’ with increasing frequency. Urban interior, interior urbanization, urban interiority and urban interior design are used as provocations for designing, teaching and writing – researching and thinking – in cities and cultures as diverse as Milan, Madrid, Melbourne, Jakarta, Austin, London, Stockholm, Bangkok, Singapore and Bogotá.

The overarching theme of this journal is design activism. Designers need to be activists, and radical shifts are needed to allow any form of activism to evolve. Institutions of higher learning and the profession need to nurture and equip the next generation of designers with new ways of learning and practice; to achieve any form of positive change, design institutions, scholars and practitioners need to urgently change their models, modes and methodologies. Design pedagogy and practice needs to be realigned away from the current asymmetrical approaches to teaching, practice and research. Over the years, I have been nurturing and expanding an overall agenda that consistently works toward developing innovative solutions to benefit civil society and improve social innovation, sustainability and the environment. Design activism informs not only my philosophy as a designer, but my philosophy and practice as a teacher and scholar.

Designing interiors is the process, we say, of finding a place for everything, and putting everything in its place. Alberti claimed that ‘Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse...’ (Leone Battista Alberti)

This issue of the journal invites interdisciplinary collaborations with landscapists, geographers, gardeners, and other lovers of the changing environment of life as well as politicians, anthropologists and theologians: papers, projects and reviews that explore the emerging consideration of the ethics of the interior: how does, or could, the interior provoke, rather than dictate, behaviours and responses? How can design make its users neither its objects, nor its subjects, but its citizens?

Interiority is subject to specific sorts of disciplinary representation and the premise for this provocation is that images of interiority are frequently at odds with, or resistant to conventional representational systems. Interiority is attached to socially and culturally selected manifestations of power, gender, labour and materiality and these everyday conditions emerge in images of interiority, drawn or written, amplifying and disquieting usual disciplinary concerns.

This provocation encapsulated in the concept Interior Economies includes contributions as scholarly essays, visual essays and theorized creative practice across domestic, commercial, institutional and industrial interior domains. Guest editor Julieanna Preston offers the following prompt for researchers concerned with the interior. ‘Originally identifying the household or family as the basic unit of society, the term economy implicates the social and material relations of a prominent type of interior, the domestic sphere. The notion of economy has expanded in contemporary usage to denote systems of production, distribution, exchange and consumption at a global scale. In much of today’s world, to be economical is to make the efficient use of resources, even to the extent of frugality. And yet, in sharp contrast and with immediate relevance, interior economy conceptually refers to a face to face relational exchange, an active sharing and social interaction which has the capacity to occur in interiors other than those inscribed by physical enclosure or geographical locale.’

Contributors to the IDEA JOURNAL 2010 respond to the provocation Interior Ecologies: exposing the evolutionary interior to propose emergent interior debates on contemporary spatial, material and performative practices. Can a critical ecological approach to practice and discourse in interiors enable expanded locales for research and experiment across disciplinary and theoretical boundaries? Normative concepts concerned with the designed habitat, or discursive debates around the interfaces of interior and exterior conditions, may fall short in provoking interior thinking to engage through ecologies of practice that contribute to advancing environments, technologies and cultures.

The IDEA JOURNAL 2010 exposes the engagement of interior practice in ecological, political, cultural and economic systems. The IDEA JOURNAL publishes scholarly accounts of writing and projects that move across disciplinary perspectives and temporal systems into an open-ended enquiry into ecologies for and of the interior.

PROVOCATION: Contributors to the IDEA JOURNAL 2009 respond to the provocation for Interior Territories: exposing the critical interior to propose interior discourses influenced by explorations into contemporary spatial, material and performative practices. What are the critical issues facing environments and societies that can be explored around the ideas of interior territories?

Within increasingly homogenised and globalised public and private interiors, concepts of territory that infer relationships with located place and field can provoke new relationships concerning spatial practices and material and immaterial ecologies. The IDEA JOURNAL 2009 seeks to expose the engagement of interior practice in contemporary ecological, cultural and economic systems. The IDEA JOURNAL publishes scholarly accounts of writing and projects that move across disciplinary perspectives and temporal and political systems to express an open-ended enquiry into an expanded territory of the interior.

When a journal of interior design/interior architecture comes into being what does it mean for its related field and those with whom it intersects? In Bourdieu’s terms, a field is a domain of meaning in which its constituent players and acts align to give it definition and generate practices that become the evolving rules of the game that continue to be contested. With the appointment of a new executive editor and editorial board in 2008, the 2007 IDEA Journal marks a point of transition and, as such, provides an opportunity to reflect on the evolution of the journal over the past years, its contribution to the field of interior design/interior architecture, and its potential to continue to inform and transform the discipline.

Remodelling existing buildings is the process of significantly changing a host building or structure to accommodate new use. It differs to practices such as preservation and conservation in that it is the process of substantially altering an existing building. Remodelling could be described as a process that encourages a continuous approach to the adaptation of an enclosure or a site. The transformation of an existing structure is a procedure that initially consists of reading the site: a course of action that ensures solid or concealed matter such as the structure or the narrative of the building can be exposed and then developed as potential generators for the modification process - a course of action that Rodolfo Machado describes as: ‘... a process of providing a balance between the past and the future’ (Machado, 1976, p. 27).

This publication of papers on matters of interior design/interior architecture and landscape architecture, and insides and outsides, is another manifestation of INSIDEOUT, a symposium held in April 2005 at Domain House in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne. The idea of holding a symposium where landscape and interior were brought together emerged during a conversation at SAHANZ, Brisbane, 2002. I remember feeling a sense of mischievous glee at the idea of holding a conference where what is usually so dominant in the fields of landscape and interior and, in a literal sense, the middle bit between them – architecture – would be absent. I wondered what kinds of conversation might be had without a dominant voice and referent.

An interior history as a concept brings together history and interior design with a particular emphasis on addressing the spatial and temporal qualities that are implicit in both practices. Titled ‘Towards an Interior History’, this paper focuses on a process of making, hence the word ‘towards’ an interior history. It is not yet in a position to define what an interior history is – to answer the question ‘what is an interior history?’ – and may never be. By the end of the paper, it is hoped that questions such as ‘How does an interior history work?’ ‘How does it function?’ will be understood as more useful to pose. Why? Because dominant models of history and interior design have produced particular kinds of histories of interior design – ones which privilege the visual, hence objects and permanent architectural elements, as well as structures of enclosure and containment. An interior history as a concept celebrates the role of history in the production of the new and seeks to respond to current forces emerging in the design of interiors – for example, temporality, movement, change, encounters. The position here is not one of criticism and a quest for a better history, an attempt to re-write the past in order to re-right. The term ‘inter-story’ – formed from a conjunction between interior and history – is introduced as a technique for re-thinking history and interior design and as an approach to be taken up in a movement towards an interior history in the making of an interior history.

Before we can approach the tension between austerity and excess – or any other productive tension in a design practice – we must first enter the metaphysical space of ‘interior’ itself. The notion of interior is always defined by at least three ‘working parts’: inside, outside, and (most important yet least noticed) the threshold setting one off from the other. Properly speaking, this threshold is neither outside nor inside; rather, in setting the limit between them, it partakes of both. Like the skin of a body or the cladding of a building, indeed like any surface, the threshold comes into contact with what lies on both sides of it, linking the two environments in the act of separating them. ‘A surface separates from out and belongs no less to one than to the other’ (Don DeLillo).

Spatial ordering systems in contemporary architecture and interior architecture based on any form of meaningful geometry is rare, the geometric ordering principles taken for granted in the great architecture of history are no longer understood, are ignored or derided as being stultifying and formulaic. That without exception these principles were based firmly on the numbers, patterns and geometries to be found in the natural world counts for very little. Our understanding of, and connection with, nature has deteriorated to such an extent that we are virtual foreigners in our land. That such a relationship between the great architecture of the past and its context was understood to be of fundamental importance, reflecting a healthy relationship between the building and the natural world, is of no importance in an age when the personal aesthetic sensitivities, predilections and tastes of the artist/designer, no matter how ill informed, are held to be the ultimate determinant of the configuration and nature of the built fabric. The gulf that has opened between humankind and the natural environment. so blindingly obvious in the ever-increasing environmental degradation wrought by human hands, cannot be argued to be unrelated to this ignorance.

'When you asked me to [...]' (Woolf 1993:3)  write about architecture and the interior I wondered where does one turn? What construction of history and theory is invoked when undertaking such a task? What position is given architecture and the interior in such writing? Might it be interiors and what they are like; might it be architecture and interiors they create; might it be architecture and interiors they write; might it be written by the interiors encountered and the books read? I am reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and I read 'Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping. If not, you will of course throw the whole of it into the wastepaper basket and forget all about it' (Woolf 1993:4), a necessary condition for establishing a shift in thought and expression over that which is held as authoritative and immovable. Unexpected thoughts on the interior.

Interested Australian universities with Interior Design/Interior Architecture degrees held an inaugural meeting in Sydney in 1996 to elicit interest in an association to advocate Interior Design/Interior Architecture education and research. In 1997 IDEA was formalised to encourage and support excellence in the discipline. This is the Inaugural publication of the annual ‘IDEA Referred Design Scheme’, one of the activities the IDEA committee promotes. Participating universities include: Curtin University of Technology, Queensland College of Art, Queensland University of Technology, Northern Territory University, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Swinburne University of Technology, University of New South Wales, University of South Australia and the University of Technology Sydney.