I hope that everyone is having a wonderful Wednesday this week! My week has been much more relaxing than the busy schedule that I had last week. I’m a little on the exhausted side.
As promised and planned, this is my interior design blog where I will do my best to explain why interior “designers” are of a different classification and breed than an interior “decorator“. Now my first post was just a very small snippet of these differences that exist in the design world. And I also might add, that as much as I do believe strongly in that interior designers should be registered and regulated by title and practice acts, I do believe that it is possible for decorators to be excellent at what they do, and some should receive some credit. It is possible, I believe, for an interior designer to not have that perfect eye for decorating but more of an eye for planning, numbers, technical details and logic. That is one thing that is so wonderful about the spectrum of this career field, it can be a career for either right or left brained designers. Now interior designers I do believe are the only ones who should be allowed to work on commercial industry projects, this is for legal, safety and liability reasons. I believe that anyone who has a knack for decorating can be liable enough to decorate residential homes, as there are much less risks, occupants and stakeholders involved.
Enough with that ramble, I kind of got carried away there.
So anyways, today, I want to talk some trash with you all. Trash paper that is. Not actual trash, because that is just not what this blog is for!
So what is trash paper? Why would I want trash paper if it is “trash”? What do designers use it for?
Trash paper is actually just a roll of your average-quality and usually more-sheer paper that designers and architects among many other professions use to sketch, conceptualize and design. One of my professors is in love with this stuff. And at its mention, most of my classmates sigh, and some roll their eyes but, I try really hard to fight the urge to participate in the trash paper ridicule. I’m in my fourth year of college in an interior design program (I still have one more year left) and I feel like there is only so much you can learn in school when it comes to this career field; 10% is what you learn in school (the bare bone basics), 90% will be what you learn when you actually get hired and get the show on the road. Then, it is a never-ending constantly-changing always-something-to-learn career.
Of the “10% bare bone basics” that we learn in our college interior design program, is the design process, which involves an insane amount of paper. Let’s take a moment of silence for all the trees that have sacrificed their lives so that I could get my diploma. I’m not kidding, sometimes I feel like my room looks like this when I clean it……
“How I feel when I clean my room sometimes.” Source: Via
So why do my classmates tend to roll their eyes at the mention of trash paper? Simply because it is old-school, time-consuming, and is more of a strategic and logical process versus dragging and dropping digitally on a computer. My professor isn’t a huge fan of all the new and latest drafting and rendering technology that is available, I’m not sure if he knows how to use it, but he doesn’t have to because he has excelled at crafting everything he does by hand; this takes years of practice and perfecting. So it truly is old school versus new school, nowadays its quicker to take a shortcut and dive straight in to do everything on the computer, it’s fast and efficient and you can see it in 3D model form if you’re using a program such as Autodesk Revit. So the computer sounds pretty awesome, huh? It sounds ideal and seems to be the most practical approach, also with a lot less clutter thanks to digital files versus actual file cabinets.
So if computers are such game changers for design process why am I talking about trash paper? The more I think about these rolls of paper that too closely resemble the rolls of paper used on examination tables, the more I see that they are actually useful and helpful. It is important as a designer to be able to have some sort of sketching and graphic communication ability beyond the computer. Sometime the computer takes more time, or sometimes it can be difficult to make adjustments. With a computer everything seems so finalized, so impersonal, so perfect. And no process it perfect, the design process is a chain of trial and error until you have came to the final conclusion and met all of your goals. As interior designers, we are seen as artists of space and interiors, artists who create environments for people to interact with. As an artist you must take pride in your craft and that may mean doing things the old fashioned way. It may be easy to drag and drop arrows and bubbles and circles and walls and doors, but I’m pretty sure anyone can do that playing on the Sims. While doing the design process on the computer, there are so many ideas that are going through your mind, this means if that idea isn’t the perfect one, than it probably won’t end up being documented on your computer. This is because we see computers as perfection, and our minds are not always perfection. Why would we waste our time making a floorplan that we discover won’t work, we just erase it and we can never learn from our mistakes.
The design process is by far the most important duty of an interior designer, we do not arrive at solutions instantly. The design process exists so that spaces, needs and function can be explored in depth so that a solution can be made. Everyone has their own design process, we are all unique in our logic, creativity and organization of thoughts. So most designs begin with a floorplan that you analyze. This is where the trash paper comes in. There are so many details to be analyzed; traffic patterns, egress, accessibility, fire exits, views, how spaces relate to one another, zoning, private versus public zones, storage, technology, doorways, windows, fluidity, I could go on and on. Trash paper is used to trace plans and sketch over plans, and since its trash paper it allows exploration and mistakes while being quick and loose. I have never seen anything produced by a designer on the computer that resembled the terms quick or loose. Trash paper allows for curiosity, you can try your ideas out no matter how absurd they may be. Paper and pencil is where the road to a design solution should always begin, simply because process is never perfect.
My trash paper explosion. Diagrams on diagrams on diagrams.
I have used countless rolls of paper over the span of the past 4 years. It is a little overwhelming to say the least. But as I have spent more time in school I have realized that maybe there is actually good reasoning behind these dreaded rolls of trash paper and maybe they can be our friends. The design process is a big puzzle with lots of problems to solve, puzzles have so many pieces and they are designed to only fit together in one particular way. This puzzle is what we are trying to arrive to as our goal. But, when putting together a puzzle, one must always experiment with how the pieces fit together, sometimes they can be deceiving. It is a process of trial and error.
A very small fraction of the design process.
So trashy.
So here is an ode to trash paper, the crunchy annoying stuff that we think is a waste of our time. Here is to crumpling our mistakes up and throwing them away, and then starting all over again. Here is to its ability to cling to everything and its even worse in Lubbock where it is so dry and static is everywhere. Here is to drawing the same thing over and over and over again, then scanning it and cropping it and printing it on paper, paper printed on paper. Here is to a step in the design and creative process that tends to set us apart from decorators.
We may hate this stuff now, but give it a break, look for the reasoning behind the meticulous detail and time that it takes to work things out with our hands and our minds. Appreciate the fact that like life, it is temporary, you can change what happens next and in the end it always gets better.
Now that was trashy.
Want to get trashy? Buy trash paper from the links below, it comes in all different sizes and lengths. I prefer white versus yellow because it scans better.
Get a super cool yellow roll of trash paper HERE!
For a sexy roll of white trash paper Get your WHITE TRASH HERE!
Image Sources:
Yellow Paper Roll White Paper Roll Lots of Rolls
Stay curious & love trash paper.
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