CSDI - The Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, based at the Royal College of Art in London, brings together three institutions: the Royal College of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Bedford Centre for the History of Women at Royal Holloway, University of London. Launched in September 2001, its goal is to develop new histories of the home, its contents, and its representation. It pursues research into the changing appearance and layout of rooms in a range of buildings, from tenements to palaces; the objects that furnished those rooms; the ways rooms and objects were depicted; the manner in which people used them; and how they thought about them.

Interior Insights: Design, Ethnography and the Home
Symposium
24-25 November 2005
Royal College of Art, London

The intimate objects and transactions of the home, its visual, material and sensory cultures, have come under increasing scrutiny from academics, practitioners and market researchers in recent years. While empirical, academic and practice-based researchers, designers and artists share a long-standing interest in the meanings, rituals and makings of the interior, communication and collaboration across different disciplines and research traditions remains minimal.

Interior Insights, a two-day symposium, exploits the home as common ground for a radically interdisciplinary discussion. How, for example, do the techniques of video ethnographers from marketing research, filming the minutiae of everyday lives from the squeezing of toothpaste to the selection of a DVD movie, intersect with those of interaction designers? How do ideas about the home interior as a sensual phenomenon, as opposed to a purely visual one, change the concept of design for domestic retail? Have a new generation of designers become pseudo-applied anthropologists? What are the ethical issues of exposing interior worlds and can research be used for social, as well as commercial, benefits?

For further information and registration visit the Interior Insights website at http://www.rca.ac.uk/csdi/interiorinsights/