IIDA Perspective - Fall/Winter 2017 - 8

TALK, TALK |

2 Designers On 1 Topic

TWO DESIGNERS talk education, technology,
and what the future holds for design's next generation.
By | Novid Parsi

W

PERSPECTIVE: What's the state of design
education?
JON OTIS: Today, design courses lean toward

technology. We train students to learn Revit and other
digitally based programs so students can create images
that look almost exactly like the real thing. But that
isn't necessarily making anybody a better designer.
We need to go back to where we started: the ideation
process of looking at things, then drawing them. I'm
not a Luddite; I understand and accept technology. But
something valuable in the process has been lost.
PRIMO ORPILLA: I'd give it an incomplete. We
used to have to learn how to sketch and do expressive
drawings prior to being a designer, so we had a critical
eye. As a student, I went to the library and did
research. Now, students do a Google search so they
all get the exact same pictures that everybody else
sources at the same time. The result is a lot of
sameness. They see something on Pinterest, and they
don't really know where it came from, but they feel
fine utilizing it in a design.

Jon Otis, IIDA

"

Students
must begin
to think
about
spaces as
experiential,
not simply
execute
renderings
that are
beautiful
but static
and
detached.

"

With 60 years of professional experience between
them, Primo Orpilla, FIIDA, and Jon Otis, IIDA,
have gleaned plenty of insight into what prepares
young designers for the real world.
Orpilla, principal and co-founder, Studio
O+A, San Francisco, California, USA, was recently
named the global chair of student experience at the
International Interior Design Association. And Otis,
the 2017 IIDA Educator of the Year, has taught for
almost two decades at Pratt Institute where he's a
professor of interior design. He also serves as principal
and creative director for OIA-Object Agency, New
York, New York, USA.
In this interview, Orpilla and Otis sound off on
what's working in design education, and what's not.

-Jon Otis, IIDA

PERSPECTIVE: What happens when students
don't develop drawing and thinking skills?
ORPILLA: I see a lot of really thin concepts with

good-looking renderings. I've heard the expression
"design deejaying." Designers take images from
Pinterest and they mix and mash them up. I'd like to
see the hand of the designer-not other designers'

8

perspective

iida.org/perspective

Primo Orpilla, FIIDA

hands co-opted into a project. It's easy to do
something aesthetically pleasing. It's hard to
do something meaningful. Designing purely for
aesthetics is not what a good designer does. A good
designer tries to understand the problem at hand
and then solve it through design-rather than using a
program to do a cool rendering.
OTIS: We're in a time of extreme temporality driven by
Instagram and Pinterest-images without much depth.
More and more information with less and less meaning.
PERSPECTIVE: How would going back to the
basics help young designers professionally?
ORPILLA: When they come to a practice like ours,

designers realize that having an aesthetically pleasing
piece without any thinking behind it won't go very
far. They need to understand a space's end users and use
that as their motivation before putting pen to paper-
instead of looking at cool pictures and creating a space
with them.
OTIS: In the design world, we need people who know
how to create meaningful spaces, not just abstract
ideas. Students must begin to think about spaces as
experiential, not simply execute renderings that are
beautiful but static and detached. So they really have to
think about how people are going to use the space. That
will better prepare them to be professionals working in
a design office.
PERSPECTIVE: What is the one thing you
didn't learn as a student that would've helped
your career?
ORPILLA: How hard this career is. When you come

from school to an office, you begin to figure out how
much you need to know to actually make a design a
reality. You begin looking at materiality differently.
Then you look at how [something is] made-many
times flipping something over just to see how it's
constructed. A good designer will have this natural
curiosity because they will take the information and
file it away for use later.
OTIS: Understanding how the business works. Ten
to 15 percent of it is design, and the rest is trying to get
the thing built-all the iterations with all the parties
involved. We could help students more with that.
http://www.iida.org/perspective
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IIDA Perspective - Fall/Winter 2017
