Broadening horizons - employability opportunities within the Interiors Programme

The session will provide detail on the pedagogic practices, which promote employability, within the Interiors department. As a creative discipline, Interior Architecture and Design students must display a mixture of skills and presentation devices to communicate their work. While honing these abilities our students are immersed in realistic, professional briefs which mimic scenarios within the industry. Do the discipline’s tacit enculturation practices, steer graduates onto specific career pathways without understanding the wider contexts that they will be working in? Our employability challenge is to widen the experience of the cohort, exposing them to the various occupations within the built environment, while engaging them with the discipline’s need to address the ongoing challenges around technology, sustainability and inclusion.

This talk will describe how the team are responding to the changing world our graduates must navigate. We will look at three specific case studies; The Metaverse, Materiality and Adaptive Reuse as Social Practice, asking current students to discuss the effect the curriculum has had on their development. These themes have led Middlesex Interior students to engage with local and global communities, which in turn can help to expand restricted ‘career imaginations’ evident on arrival to the programmes. It is hoped that reflecting on these strategies will provoke further conversations applicable to many other programmes.