I wish I was taking a nap, but since I'm not...

Considering that this is how I feel today, I am going to link/and post an article Paul sent me this morning. Side note: I snapped this photo a few nights ago while laying on the couch. Paul and I were talking and had the TV on and our cat had apparently had enough of our excitement. She plopped down, stuck her face in the couch and took a nap. A face planted nap sounds wonderful doesn't it?

If you are not an interior designer, you probably will have no desire to continue reading this post. I'll be on my soap box for a moment.

Since I started college I have found that "interior design" bashing is quite fun for some people. There's the standard jokes about fluffing pillows and picking paint colors and people rarely realize what an actual, educated, licensed designer does. In fact, I've never "fluffed" or specified a pillow in my entire career. Yes we pick finishes and furniture and accessories, but we do much more than that.

We're given a building shell, and we make the interior what it is. We help determine, or sometimes just determine without help where walls are to be placed, how large rooms need to be, we have to follow the same codes and regulations that architects have to follow. We design ceilings, lighting, millwork, etc. We are more than capable to work on buildings. Most states require you to be registered after you've been educated and passed an examination, just like an architect, or a doctor or any other profession where the health, safety and welfare of people are at stake.

So, when Paul sent me this post this morning written by IIDA HQ about OSU Professor Drab's research stating that some of the problem comes from ourselves and the words we use and that our publications use to describe projects and our process, it made sense.

That Elephant is...umm...Big

Judging by the overwhelming response to the blog post “10 Reasons Interior Designers Matter,” I think it’s safe to say that there are a lot of misconceptions about interior design and its practitioners. And you’re a little sick of it. Ok, very sick of it.

Well, turns out the design community and their publications may not be doing justice to the profession, at least in the printed word. Research at Oklahoma State University over the last decade analyzed the language used by writers of design periodicals and interior design practitioners when describing the activities of interior designers (Drab, p. 543), and what they found may surprise you.

Researchers found that verbs such as “love” and “like” and adjectives such as “beautiful” and “simple” rank among the most used in design publications and by design practitioners. To me, this is like calling an elephant big. It doesn’t do the creature justice. Big is a relative term; that is, it doesn’t take on meaning until the audience interprets the word — and because every audience member’s world of experience is different, it means something different to each individual. To one person, big might mean the size of a house. To another, it might mean a pair of pants she wishes she didn’t have to buy.

Using an objective term to describe the elephant helps standardize the vision; for instance, “that elephant weighs 2 tons.” The same issue applies to defining interior design. “Love,” “like,” “beautiful” and “simple” are emotional words. The emotional context of these words contributes to the misunderstanding of the business discipline and the art of interior design. These words don’t provide the audience with a very complex view of the talents of the designer or the merits of the project.

Since most of you aren’t editors of design publications, your audience will most likely be a client, a friend or an acquaintance. When describing your projects, why not use words that describe how you followed a systematic process when designing the space? Take the time to explain how you researched design solutions to increase efficiency or safety in the workplace. Your work isn’t lazy or one-dimensional, so your words shouldn’t be either.

Lucky for you, NCIDQ provides a multi-faceted definition of interior design on their website. These words and descriptions do more for the elevation of the profession than an emotional outpouring could ever do. And in combination, they’re targeted. If we want the world to take seriously the profession of design, shouldn’t we use serious words?

It’s never a bad idea to double check ourselves before we exclaim over how “beautiful that room is” or “how we love the simplicity of that design.” This isn’t to say that the emotional component of design isn’t important, because it is. That’s the art of design. Just remember to include the business discipline as well. Because while the art of it may be fairly evident to the observer, the discipline may not be. Your job is to explain what about the project’s beauty or simplicity makes it the work of a professional. And then the public will begin to develop the vocabulary for design from both perspectives.

When Google can start to get weird...

When I first started thinking about posting about our pregnancy, my intial thought was to do a funny post to announce it to the world. So I Googled "i'm having a baby" and looked at Google Images to find things to post about. Bad, bad idea. I highly recommend against that. However, some funny stuff did pop up (that I'm obviously blogging about). Like the duct taped baby:

Really? You duct taped your child to the wall and to keep her happy added the duck? At some point I can see the duck not being able to console her any longer and then you're just stuck with a hysterical baby on a wall that will later be ruined by duct tape residue. Yea, smart thinking. Oh internet world, you amuse me.

12 down 28 to go...

Baby Ryckbost (via Paul and Christa) will be making a debut in February of 2011 and we are EXCITED!

Hello world changing.

Hello maternity jeans.

I've been waiting for this for awhile. Well, not the maternity jeans part but the baby part, and the shouting it from the rooftops part. However, all of a sudden I'm having a really hard time deciding what to shout - other than "we're having a baby!".

Some days I feel like things have already moved so quickly and that the next 28 weeks is going to be gone before I know it but then other days I feel like it is going to take years to get here.

The days where I'm thinking about refinishing the wood floors, and fixing up the back two rooms, and doing this and doing that are the days I am grasping at what little time I feel like we have to get prepared. Especially since the month of Decemeber, Paul and I will only be in our house for 10 or 12 days.

But the days where I'm thinking about seeing our baby for the first time and what it will be like to be a family of three (because there's only one in there in case you were wondering...) I feel like it is going to take forever for 2011 to arrive.

We are so blessed and so excited we can barely contain it. Paul tells me goodbye every morning, kisses my forehead (because I have a cold) and then tells the baby goodbye too. I love that he's excited. I like seeing him with kids and I know I'm going to love him more as a dad.

dumpster diving anyone?

A few weeks ago a co-worker of mine threw away a couple of large tiles that we didn't need for a project any longer into our large trash can. The next morning, the tiles were all out on our flat files. It was a little twilight zone-ish. Someone had taken them out of the trash and we all laughed about it, she grabbed them, threw them into her desk trash can and went on about her day. The next morning she came in to find them on her desk again. The people who collect our trash after hours apparently thought that those tiles really were worth something and they were not going to be a part of throwing them away.

Here's the deal...we order thousands of samples. THOUSANDS. Tile, carpet tile, laminate pieces, fabrics, solid surface counter pieces, wood door samples, you name it, we order it for meetings with clients and for colorboards. For as sustainable as we are and we make buildings to be, we are typically, as a profession, very wasteful. We have to be, it's part of our job. And we have a library FULL of materials and samples. So full in fact, it's dangerous. We keep as much as we can but at some point we just have to throw things out when we are done with them.

We also try and re-use what we can. Carpet tiles are huge and people love them for the garages, back porches, to cut up and use on shelves, etc. So we have huge carpet giveaways in our office. We also have a co-worker who takes the all of our larger tiles to Peru once a year where she does a lot of mission work to use as grave markers in their small cemetery. I'm not bragging about that, just stating that we try and re-use what we can within reason.

Here's my real story:

Yesterday I was purging my desk of old samples that never got used (that I knew we had a book in the library of) and threw some tile in the trash. I started cleaning out drawers and found a scarf I had bought at H&M for no more than $10.00 that I tore a hole in last winter and decided that it wasn't worth holding onto any longer, especially at my desk. So I chunked it. There's a hole in it.

Well, apparently they pilfered through our trash again last night and pulled out a few of the 5" tiles and the scarf and left them on my desk for me, like I had made a mistake.

They're men by the way the people who take our trash. I've never had a lady take my trash from under my desk when I've been working late.

Well, I'd like to know what this guy thinks I'm going to use a single 5" slate tile for. I can understand if I had a box of them, I could do a table or something, but really, just one?

And the scarf, if you don't think I should throw it away, I obviously don't want it and if the hole doesn't bother you, take it.

Goodwill and Salvation Army won't even want it, in case I haven't mentioned it, it's GOT A HOLE IN IT. 

I moved the tile to a different trash can in hopes it gets pitched and amd I'm still staring at the scarf.

robberson steel co., oklahoma city

We found this steel company while driving around parts of Oklahoma City we had never been in before a few weeks ago. We do that a lot. Around 2:00 pm on a Saturday afternoon, we get fidgety, so we go to Sonic for happy hour priced drinks and then we explore until we find things like this.