Category: Advocacy

This year, IIDA took an important step in its advocacy efforts when both the Northern and Southern California Chapters of IIDA voted to support Senate Bills (SB) 31 and 32, both authored by Senator Dave Cortese from Santa Clara. In a nutshell, both bills were aimed at promoting building decarbonization to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and in turn, reduce greenhouse gas emissions. More information about IIDA’s entry into this type of legislation here.

Representatives of both IIDA chapters met early on with Senator Cortese’s staff to seek clarification on the bill language, and to commend the Senator for taking bold action on this crucial issue. The Senator’s office expressed gratitude for our support on these measures, and understood that commercial interior designers have key role to play in the implementation of whatever steps we take to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, especially in the new building inventory that will be built between now and 2045, when California hopes to meet its goal of relying entirely on zero-emission energy sources.

As can often happen with bills like this that propose sweeping reform (often with high price tags associated), these bills both stalled in the Senate. SB 31 has been designated a two-year bill (meaning Senator Cortese can continue to work on this bill and add it to his legislative package again in 2022-23), and SB 32 died in the Appropriations Committee. 

“While this may sound disheartening, it’s a very common outcome for bills of this nature, and there are some key factors to note when putting that outcome into context,” said Christina Marcellus, IIDA’s California lobbyist. First off, as a post-COVID organizational rule, Legislative leadership imposed a strict 12 bill limit on every member of the Legislature. This limit was imposed in mid-May, just as both SBs 31 and 32 were set to be heard in the Senate Appropriations committee. “For every author with more than 12 bills total, difficult decisions had to be made,” Marcellus said. Senator Cortese has a robust bill package, and perhaps figured that other bills he was authoring had a better chance of success this year than either of these, and had to make that difficult call not to pursue them. 

While these bills ultimately weren’t successful this year, Senator Cortese is new to the Legislature and IIDA’s California chapters support the Senator in continuing to be a champion for clean energy climate solutions. While legislation is the main vehicle to advance a policy change, it’s also possible that these types of programs get funded directly through the state budget, which can sometimes make bills with a similar goal obsolete. 

IIDA’s involvement in legislation not directly related to the design industry is a crucial step in expanding awareness of the work interior designers do, and the role they play in the health, welfare and safety not only of people who inhabit their designed spaces, but also of our natural environment.  We will continue to look for on-ramps like this into areas related to our work to build partnerships, develop awareness, and enhance IIDA’s profile in Sacramento.

In a landmark move, IIDA’s Northern and Southern California boards both voted to publicly support California Senate Bills 31 and 32 at their April meetings. SB 31 and 32 target the decarbonization of buildings as a way of combating global warming; this is an area of clear importance to our industry, and where we can have a direct impact. Both the Northern and Southern California chapters of IIDA were eager to take this step and become public advocates for these new pieces of legislation.

The bills were introduced by State Senator Dave Cortese of District 15 (Santa Clara County). SB 31 would require the state’s Energy Commission to use some state and federal funds to implement regulatory programs promoting decarbonization for new and existing buildings, while SB32 addresses how cities and counties in California plan for energy efficiency, directing them to specifically target decarbonization as well. IIDA’s Northern and Southern California boards felt these sensible measures align with our mission for several reasons:

First, IIDA values sustainability and believes more radical action is needed to move the needle on slowing and ultimately reversing climate change. On the heels of the United States’ renewed commitment to the Paris Climate Accord, we believe that climate action implemented in California will set a sweeping example for the country and the world to follow. 

Echoing this first point, IIDA Northern California’s President-Elect, Verda Alexander, recently launched a joint-chapter initiative to increase commercial interior designer’s participation in climate action—citing the responsibility of designers to meet this challenge, considering that buildings are responsible for 40% of energy consumption in the United States. 

Second, IIDA members are experts in a wide-ranging field and can employ that perspective and expertise to create positive change, following a strong precedent set by other professional associations in our industry including the AIA (American Institute of Architects) and ASME (American Society for Mechanical Engineers), who have weighed in on similar legislation.

Finally, misconceptions about commercial interior designers are still common in our state and local governments, and joining this kind of discussion makes us more visible and gives us the chance to shine a light on what we do. “As IIDA engages with lawmakers regarding SB31 and SB32, we also have the opportunity to educate our representatives about our profession, our skills, and our impact on the health and safety of their constituents,” says Laura Taylor, VP of Advocacy for IIDA’s Northern California chapter. “This work not only elevates our image as a profession, but also builds relationships with policy makers who could one day introduce or vote on legislation that will impact our practice.”

SB31 and SB32 are set for hearing in the Senate Appropriations Committee where arguments and amendments will be heard and the bills will be formally voted on. If the bills get out of their current Committee, they will head to the Senate Floor for a vote by the full body. Check back to IIDA’s newsroom for Part 2 including a detailed breakdown of SB31 and SB32 by IIDA’s California lobbyist.

Sonoma County, north of the San Francisco Bay, covers a large area, but it is a tight community with very few degrees of separation among its residents. When the 2017 Tubbs Fire took out nearly 6,000 homes in Santa Rosa, Sonoma County’s largest city, everyone was affected to some degree.

1 in 5 people had to evacuate, often with little warning and no time to save possessions. If you weren’t one of them, you knew someone who was. By the second day of the disaster, I had a space planner from Sonoma County and a furniture installer for a local dealership staying at my house in Petaluma with their family. They had lost everything and gotten out with minutes to spare before their Santa Rosa home burned to the ground.

Responding to a crisis like the Tubbs Fire is, at base, a design problem. What do survivors need in the short-, mid-, and long-term? What do cities and organizations need to help those evacuees, and to shore up and redirect their own infrastructure? These are the kinds of questions we designers are adept at understanding—and where our organized creative process provides a proven path to solutions.

In 2017, our North Bay City Center Director, Christina Pratt, Assoc. IIDA, owner of Trope Group, the local Herman Miller dealer had been evacuated from her home in the more rural part of Sonoma County, and Trope Group’s offices became a gathering space and safe haven for her employees who had been evacuated. With their usual work at a standstill, Trope Group put their centralized location and their fleet of trucks to use. They quickly set up a process for collecting supplies from local businesses and donation centers and delivering them to the shelters and evacuation facilities where they were desperately needed.

As the fire was contained and we began to look for next steps, individuals grappled with rebuilding while the cities and county faced an even bigger problem: the devastation of the fire had made our housing crisis much worse. Our homeless population had increased and some of the resources they’d relied on had disappeared—and, given the high costs in our area, many folks were simply finding it impossible to replace the homes they’d lost.

Only a short time later, a multi-disciplinary group of design professionals got together to brainstorm about how design thinking could help to re-house people quickly and efficiently—and Homes for Sonoma was born. This organization is composed of designers, architects, marketers, and community leaders who took a time of tragedy and turned it into an opportunity for a larger conversation about building, living, and working more densely.

After the fires, I advocated for our Northern California Chapter to throw all its philanthropic support toward this effort—and for all our City Centers to contribute to the pool, as well. The Board agreed, and IIDA Northern California donated its entire philanthropic funds for 2017, the largest donation in the chapter’s history, to Homes for Sonoma to further the design thinking strategies they had identified to help revitalize suburban Northern California. The North Bay City Center also donated to the organization, and various other monies were pooled for a total of $43,140 from our design community.

Less than a year later, Homes for Sonoma completed its first modular units and began to move survivors into new long-term housing for below-market rents. The organization continues to address this problem, actively looking for more land and also pursuing less traditional approaches like helping private homeowners establish accessory dwelling units on their property.

Within the design community, we have also continued our efforts to learn, explore, and offer real solutions. To continue the conversation about how we rebuild our community, the North Bay City Center focused its 2018 Spring Forum on the topic of “Revisioning suburbia and challenging our notion of density and scale.”

Of course, the need to respond to disasters never stops for long. In 2018, an even more devastating set of wildfires hit California, and in 2020 we, like the rest of the world, are dealing with the many impacts of the coronavirus. All varieties of commercial interiors have been greatly affected, and Sonoma County, which has historically been slow to embrace new technologies or remote working, has had a meteoric shift.

This is an amazing time for a greater strategic conversation about what our public spaces can be and how they might function better for the benefit of all. There’s a clear benefit to having design professionals—especially commercial interior designers—provide strategic input to cities, businesses, and leading organizations, as we are trained to bring insights into human behavior and experience and we have deep knowledge about materials, sustainability, and health and wellness to bring to every space we consider. Problem-solving is a design exercise, and when it comes to disaster response, we’ve demonstrated—as we did in the aftermath of the Tubbs Fire—that we can bring unique insights and create valuable long-term solutions. 

Like every other industry today, architecture & design are having serious, soul-searching conversations around diversity, equity, and inclusion. But we may be missing a straightforward legal adjustment that could change the inner workings of the industry in profound and positive ways. 

Our industry has focused for a long time on the overwhelming whiteness of the designer/architect pipeline. We have centered our diversity and inclusivity action plans on outreach to incoming generations of BIPOC (Black, Indigiouness, and people of color) college, high school, even elementary students who’ve historically not been exposed to or recruited by our industry. Programs like Architects in the Schools, Hip Hop Architecture, and Citizen Schools, among others, have all made great strides in beginning to close that talent gap. And for those who love our craft, sharing it with BIPOC students may naturally be the most attractive and sustainable form of activism.

But the emphasis on industry pipeline ignores the barriers to professional advancement young BIPOC designers face once they’ve joined the profession. In spite of decades of efforts public and private, in our industry, female designers, queer designers, black and brown designers are often still working for straight, white, male architects.

The current demographic makeup of the industry—and the undeniably different makeup of its leadership—is not just due to the discriminatory practices of individuals or companies. It is the inescapable result of regulatory laws that have failed to evolve with the industry and have resultantly granted disproportionate power to one class and professional category over all others. Despite years of diversification of design specialties, architects—who are overwhelmingly white and male—remain the legally designated authorities over our entire industry.

The history of commercial interior design explains this. Our discipline emerged from the practice of architecture in the last half of the 20th century due to the increased complexity of interior spaces and a new demand for thoughtfully designed interiors. Whereas interiors used to be just the accidental result of external architecture, in the 1960s and 70s both clients and designers began to see the potential for interiors to function as spaces that would help employees work more efficiently, students learn more effectively, patients heal more quickly. Interiors could, more generally, improve the quality of life for everyone who moved through and occupied them. This awareness created a new focus and need for a professional perspective independent from that of traditional architecture. Thus the commercial interior designer was born. 

In addition to those personal and workplace challenges, the state has erected a legal barrier to professional advancement for non-architects. Commercial interior designers are not included in the California State Civil Code’s definition of Design Professionals, and they typically cannot submit drawings for permit without the stamp and signature of an architect. An ambitious commercial interior designer thus faces a professional impasse, and can find they have no pathway to ownership at all, since achieving this legal authority is often a requirement. 

Is it ethical to encourage young students to get a degree in a field which doesn’t allow them access to the hallmarks of power in the industry? Do students know their choice of interior design over architecture may mean they never get the opportunity to submit drawings for acceptance at a building department all on their own, and may prevent them from ever achieving a position of ownership?

The practice of the law, itself, proves its antiquity. Architects aren’t generating all these drawings themselves; they are often stamping the work of commercial interior designers which includes details and specifications unfamiliar to them. These specifications, of course, represent the daily work and core competency of commercial interior design. It’s clear that the state needs to establish a new tier of recognition for qualified commercial interior designers that acknowledges and respects the specialized training and knowledge of commercial interior designers, who ensure that all citizens have safe, accessible, useful spaces to move through. 

The idea of creating a new and particularly rigorous requirement for full participation in the industry might seem wrong-headed in terms of increasing diversity and equity. But as sociologist Beth Redbird’s research has found, “licensure… creates a set of institutional mechanisms that enhance entry into the occupation, particularly for historically disadvantaged groups…” In other words, providing a clear path to advancement allows people to pursue and achieve it equally, without such exclusionary considerations as personal connections and subjective assessments of style that in the past have served to suppress greater diversity among practitioners. In Redbird’s sample of 300 occupations over 30 years, the creation of occupational licensure increased the proportion of Black workers by more than 3%. Given the current demographics of our industry, 3% would be a significant improvement. 

Importantly, associating real professional benefits like the ability to stamp and sign drawings with occupational licensure would not just increase the proportion of historically marginalized populations in the profession. Bestowing legal authority on interior designers through certification would qualify them for entry into partnerships and other senior leadership positions, from which they are now often technically excluded. In the short-to-mid-term, this would inevitably elevate a more diverse population into positions of ownership within the architecture and design world overall. 

If we want BIPOC individuals to join, enrich, and diversify our profession—and we do, far beyond simply responding to the social pressure of this moment—we owe them a future that presents unfettered potential for leadership, ownership, influence, respect, and impact. Licensure of commercial interior designers is a critical change we can make right now to help level the playing field and open up those opportunities.