Interior Design – (B.A.)

This Interior Design degree aims to foster your creativity and develop your professionalism. We offer a supportive environment that encourages unique vision and helps you realise your creative potential before working in industry.

Interior designers engage with social questions of how we all live, work and play in interior and surrounding spaces. These questions have a dynamic human focus and can have many exciting solutions. Our approach is to support the development of your research, your thinking and communication processes to enable you to envisage creative and innovative solutions to current design problems. You will learn, guided by a wide range of industry specialists, the skills needed for you to participate in this exciting area.

This course saw its first students graduate in 2009 and graduates have already found employment in design practices and businesses. Other students have further specialised by pursuing postgraduate study. To assist with these links, we encourage live projects, foster connections with design groups and support student placements Cambridge has a multitude of work experience and design opportunities available to enable you to gain skills which are highly valued by employers. Our proximity to London's design festivals and galleries, means there is a wealth of opportunities for you to gain important work experience and creative depth.

On this Interior Design Degree course we aim to turn your aspirations into the skills, processes, and knowledge needed for professional practice. We are responsive to your needs and there is extensive tutorial based learning to assist your creative development. We also encourage collaborations with illustrators, sculptors, fashion and set and costume design students in a variety of modular courses. These cross discipline collaborations add creative insight and depth into the design process. This is a flexible course of study, one that allows you to delve deeper into areas of particular interest, or to study subjects that you think may prove particularly valuable to your future career. Because this course is taught within an art school environment, we place great emphasis on the creative processes which are needed to underpin the practical and technical skills you will develop. Our BA (Hons) Interior Design Degree is distinct in encouraging and supporting both your technical and creative development as well as providing you with the necessary theoretical background and project management skills to allow you to evolve and grow in order to meet the changing demands of Interior Design industry.

Designers emerging from the BA (Hons) Interior Design course have a skill set with clear visual communication abilities and a strong client focus and are ready to engage within the industry of interior design. Your final year will concentrate on preparing you for industry as you will have identified and developed your area of specialism and produced a body of work as the basis for a portfolio for interview.

Additional course information
Level 1 (Year 1)

Students develop confidence, communication skills and process through collaborative and independent work.
The first-year introduces core aspects of interior design through a range of key skills: drawing as a creative process, the development of three dimensional investigative/conceptual designs and the technical and aesthetic principles that are fundamental to the space, form and order of the built environment. These include colour, texture and spatial planning (initially for the domestic or small-scale environment).

Level 2 (Year 2)

Students build confidence, process and communication skills with a focus on developing professionalism.The second-year is designed to develop the skills initiated in level 1 and broaden your application, by developing opportunities for specialisation and the exploration of more complex design problems. Through a series of projects designed to investigate the challenges of public space: retail, leisure and working environments, you will develop a deeper understanding of the role and responsibility of the interior designer. The course explores the environmental impact of different approaches to design and specification, investigating ecotecture, sustainable technologies and the sourcing of green materials.

Level 3 (Year 3)

Students focus on professional communication using developed process and skills.The third-year provides the opportunity for you to focus on your specialist direction within interior design, with a view to producing a body of relevant work suitable for interview situations in your preferred career direction. You are encouraged to solve challenging design problems, utilising an enhanced awareness of contemporary interior design practice within a modern informational culture.