Abstract
Service-learning projects provide excellent opportunities for design instructors to introduce genuine budgets and schedules, and for students to experience team dynamics and conflict resolution. Building skills in these areas can be difficult when using hypothetical clients and design problems in a studio format. As Sterling (2007), points out in her article Service-Learning and Interior Design: A Case Study, “There is a necessity for students majoring in interior design to have a variety of experiences that simulate work-related projects and processes” (p. 333) to better equip them to move into the profession. Typically, service-learning projects are recognized for the gratifying experiences they provide as noted by a student’s reflection journal response: “It was a fun way to not only get the chance to work with a community… but feel like you are making an impact on them.” In addition to providing a sense of satisfaction for students, servicelearning can also address CIDA Standard 6n: The interior design program provides exposure to the role and value of public service (Council for Interior Design Accreditation, 2016). These types of projects, however, are providing another set of skills not easily attainable in the classroom, skills directly related to project realism. For this class project, students proposed renovations for a low-income housing community’s learning center. The institutional studio design course utilized the four criteria for service-learning outlined in the article Deconstructing Service-Learning: A Framework for Interior Design: relating the service-learning project to course objectives, applying course knowledge, connecting to the community, and reflecting on learning (Zollinger, Guerin, Hajiyanni, and Martin, 2009). Student reflection journals from the class included comments such as, “I think this project has exposed us to things that we never could have learned in a ‘normal’ studio class,” and “This is more real than anything we have done in school so far.” One clear outcome of the course was students’ understanding of the requirements and constraints of an authentic design process. These experiences can help the students deal with disappointments and face some of their fears now, before they graduate. One student commented in her journal prior to the start of the project that she was “worried about being able to join client wants with the practicality and budget.” Professional designers encounter such concerns every day, but these considerations are not usually integrated into the classroom experience. In Gerald Eisman’s piece What I Never Learned in Class: Lessons From CommunityBased Learning (2000), he identifies studies completed by Janet Eyler and Dwight Giles, which confirmed that students who participate in service-learning are more thoughtful and effective and that experiential learning opportunities introduce the complexities of real-world design issues leading to greater confidence in students. Opportunities for realistic and practical skill building seemed to manifest in this service-learning project more naturally than in a typical studio. It can be challenging in a studio course that introduces service-learning to ensure both that the course learning objectives are met and that the community partner’s needs are achieved where students are forced to reconcile their own wants for the project with the requests from the client. Despite these challenges posed by a service-learning project, the practical skills, connection to community, and valuable experiences are worth it. As one student put it, “It was rewarding enough to meet and interact with the community, but even more rewarding to have created a space for the community we had become so involved with.”