Interior Futurists

On March 28th, 2016 the Healthy Materials Lab hosted the Interior Futurists Festa at Parsons School of Design. The event was held in an unusual immersive space designed and built by MFA Interior Design students at Parsons School of Design, and brought together the NYC Interior Design community, alumni and friends of Parsons, and advocates for healthy materials towards making healthier homes.

One interior design student offers a reflection on her experience designing and building the space:

Is Everything is Going to Kill Us?

Why that Empowers me as an Aspiring Interior Designer

Last month, several members of the MFA Interior Design program at Parsons constructed an immersive dinner party environment composed of healthier flooring materials donated by manufacturer friends of the Healthy Materials Lab, and inspired by the dinner parties of the Futurists. As a member of this team, I worked with my classmates to find inventive ways to highlight the aesthetic and physical properties of these materials.

Throughout the build week we asked ourselves what ‘healthy’ really means to a built environment. The truth is that nothing is healthy, insofar as healthy means ‘promoting good health,’ because the definition of the state of good health eludes us. Our bodies are in a constant state of deterioration from the effects of gravity, and sheer living takes a daily toll on us.

When it feels like we are delaying the inevitable, it would be a reasonable coping strategy to tune out the information altogether and turn on autopilot. It would be reasonable for a person to go through life eating just what tasted good, it would be reasonable for an interior designer to choose materials for a project based solely on the look or feel of it….“What’s the point if it’s all going to kill us?”

When I asked myself this very question, I took it to its logical conclusion: everything is going to kill me, because one day I am going to die. If I accept that one day I am going to die from any number of causes, I can accept and cherish that I have a limited (but not insignificant) agency over this inevitability. I can do my best to not willfully contribute to deteriorating health by making conscious, informed choices.

Furthermore, I can do my best to make better choices for the health of those in my care; those who will inhabit the spaces I construct. By constructing a temporary environment made of healthier (i.e.- less bad for you) materials predictive of the future, I realized that the only way to build a future was to focus on the now: exercise the agency I have been given to make reasonably informed choices when selecting materials for a built environment.