INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN
BACHELOR OF SCIENCE

Combine modern artistry and spatial functionality.

If creating inspiring and purposeful spaces where people live, work, and play is your passion, Mercyhurst’s Interior Architecture and Design program is the path for you. Pursuing a career in interior design will allow you to let your creativity flow while researching and implementing safe structures, innovative spatial planning, and purposeful beauty in each of your building layouts. It will be your responsibility to create environments that are both aesthetic and technologically sound. 

As an interior designer, the sky is the limit to what you can create. Your future career can lead you to design structures that serve the greater community led by innovation and technology. Professional interior designers must keep aesthetics, environmental design, and community impact in mind as they work with the technical aspects of constructing their ideas.

Our Interior Architecture and Design program is housed within the Walker College of Business, providing students not only a strong foundation in applied art and design, but a variety of related fields including marketing, management, sustainability, history, and ethics. All students are supervised through an internship experience to build their portfolio in a real-world professional setting. Students receive hands-on experiences with community building and design projects and are networked with professionals from the design world.

Mission

The Department of Interior Architecture and Design establishes its mission as the promotion of the intellectual, emotional, social, physical, and spiritual growth of the student as an effective citizen through liberal and professional education. Therefore, the programs prepare the student not only for a career, but also for life. Faculty and students are challenged to integrate social responsibility with career competence and a commitment to human values. 

The faculty believes that:

• Education is a life-long process of guided and purposeful activity, directed toward the development of the individual according to his/her needs, abilities, interests, and potential.
• Education is not merely a passive acquisition of knowledge, but rather the meaningful interpretation of that knowledge, and an understanding capable of producing intelligent decisions and actions. 
• Learning is a change in behavior brought about through experience.
• The identification of learning outcomes is done cooperatively by the student and teacher. 
• Self-discovery, self-growth, and self-expression are best achieved in a relaxed and open environment which remains sensitive and adaptive to the student’s needs and abilities.
• The teacher is a facilitator of that self-discovery and self-growth.

They further believe that learning in the professional environment, where students interact with clients and professionals and can apply theoretical principles, is very effective in developing professional proficiency as well as classroom/studio-oriented education. 

The meaning of this philosophy for Interior Architecture and Design education is that the curriculum should provide a judicious balance of learning experience with essential knowledge and understanding to be gained in the physical, behavioral and social sciences, humanities, professional sciences and communicative sciences. As potential translators of architectural and interior science, the students need the science (knowledge) and the art (skill) inherent in the interior design profession. Only when they have cultivated moral values can they translate this science and art into action, in a wide variety of settings, with sensitivity, self-reliance, social concern, and genuine compassion for others. 

Learning Outcomes

• Students will have a global view of their responsibility as stewards of natural resources and the impact of design decisions within the parameters of ecological, socio-economic, and cultural contexts.
• Students will understand and address human needs (social, economic, political, psychological, and physiological) in the applied practice of interior design.
• Students will respond with creative problem-solving by exploring complex problems and generating creative solutions that optimize the human experience within the interior environment.
• Students will engage in multi-disciplinary collaboration.
• Students will effectively communicate visually, orally and in the written word using appropriate techniques and technologies.
• Students will understand and adopt accepted standards of business and organizational practices with commitment to the highest levels of professional standards and ethics and will demonstrate a willingness to advance not only themselves but the profession of interior design as a whole. 
• Students will develop a strong sense of the theoretical basis of art and design and will use historical and cultural context and precedence to enhance design decisions. 

Career Outcomes

During your four years of study, you’ll develop a portfolio to demonstrate your talents for prospective employers after graduation. Our students get hands-on design experience working on projects at local retail, restaurant, healthcare and institutional businesses and residences. You’ll also have the opportunity to compete in several different design competitions on the regional, state, and national level. Our mentoring program brings experienced professionals from architecture and design firms, materials manufacturers, and national design organizations into the classroom, so that beginning freshman year, you’ll be engaging with potential employers and networking for your future.

With excellent career and academic advising and an extensive alumni network at top employers around the world, our Interior Architecture and Design graduates pursue a wide range of careers. Our graduates are working in industries including:

• Facilities planning 
• Product design
• Healthcare design 
• Residential design
• Hospitality design 
• Sustainable design
• Kitchen and bath design 
• Visual merchandising

State Authorization

This program may fulfill a portion of the requirements leading to licensure within this field. Please visit the State Authorization webpage to review the requirements for licensure by state or program.