Decorating and home shows may have us thinking that interior design is about choosing shower tile, paint colors, and deciding whether to “open up” the floorplan. But to Dana Vaux, University of Nebraska at Kearney’s 室内与产品设计 Associate Professor, design is so much more. “When I taught the introductory class, I started out with ‘what is interior design?’ It’s not what we see on HGTV. It’s very much a technical skill.” For Vaux, it’s also about research and helping people understand “how much the physical environment impacts our psychological, emotional, and relational well-being. “

好奇心驱动研究

当谈到室内设计、教学和研究时，Vaux的全身都亮了起来，她解释说，在她的领域有两种类型的研究。 Design research, which is “researching for a specific context or space” and research for design which “starts out with something very general and applies it to a targeted context, or multiple scenarios.” For example, if research was being done for a Kindergarten and an outdoor space, “the first might ask, what is the best use of indoor-outdoor space for this classroom?” The second would ask “what’s the impact of having outdoor spaces for 5-year-olds?”

Vaux enjoys research for design and weaves this type of research into her 室内与产品设计 classes at 太阳城娱乐官网. Freshman research coffee shops “to start to understand how the physical environments and humans interact” whereas seniors in her research methods class choose a topic, such as lighting or children with autism, to “begin to understand how to design or make an environment more accessible for humans.”

学习促进教学

Vaux, whose decorating style leans towards eclectic, sees research as “almost like self-learning. You could read in a book that people like to sit by windows, but when you see it and make that connection, and go ah-ha, it can now be applied to multiple settings.”  

研究人员充满好奇心，提出问题，解决问题，并乐于学习。 沃克斯做到了这三点。 这使她成为太阳城娱乐官网的教师-学者模式的一个很好的例子，突出了周期性的教育过程。 It’s where teachers are also researchers and “bring things back to the classroom that informs their teaching and impacts your students, one graduating class at a time, which further impacts the field and your research.” A teacher’s research brings value, but as Dana explains, “that’s not the end goal. 最终目标是让它回来影响你的教学，然后影响你的学生。 That’s the multiplier.”

But it’s not only the students who are learning from their teacher. 沃克斯，谁已经在太阳城娱乐官网教了过去8年，也从她的学生学习。 It’s one thing she loves about teaching. “I’m always learning from my students. They bring me things I haven’t thought about or together we think about things in new ways, and that’s really exciting.”

解决问题带来新产品

While teaching her first research methods class, Vaux discovered there was no “book targeted for interior design research that was accessible to early master’s students or undergraduate students.” She solved this problem by designing her own curriculum, “pulled from different resources.” She then teamed up with David Wang, her former architect professor who taught her research class at Washington State University, to co-author and edit 室内设计的研究方法：应用内饰. “I guess my primary motivation wasn’t just that nothing met my own need. But, if we want interior designers to understand more about the environment they build and how humans are impacted, we need to teach research.”

Also, her forthcoming book, 建筑与室内设计实践中的实践伦理, available for spring semester 2023, is another groundbreaking book in her field.  Dana与David Wang和他的同事、建筑师Sue Lani Madsen共同撰写了这本书。 Wang和Madsen使用的是2000年的一本伦理学教科书，他们想为本科生写一本包括建筑和室内设计的最新书籍。 When they approached Vaux with the book concept, she “liked the idea of having a book that centered on practice content, but also talked about ethics. These are the kinds of issues a student wrestles with once they get into practice.” 每一章都以一个虚构的实践场景开始，处理现实生活中的问题。 Some things are “right or wrong, legal or illegal. But ethics is the weighing of what’s the best decision for the scenario that’s good for all the stakeholders.”

去年春天，沃克斯在她的班级里测试了这本书的内容。 “It was fun. Having the scenarios made it easy to talk about the professional practice.” 学生 sometimes “chose a different character and defend that character’s position.” Vaux says she’s most excited about the book because “it’s ethics, but within the context of practice issues, which helps students succeed. They understand better how the business world works.”

提问驱动未来

她的爱好写作，鲜花，骑自行车和游泳之间，沃克斯赢得了几个教师奖在太阳城娱乐官网。 Last year, her and a colleague won an award for research into how the idea of virtual space impacts “student attachment in the virtual classroom and their connectedness in terms of a sense community and collaboration.”  她也是IDEC交流的主编，这是一个两年一次的出版物和室内设计教育者组织。 “It gives us opportunities to share what’s going on in our classrooms and in our research related to a current topic.”

When asked about her next book, Vaux who at the time of this interview was in the middle of editing and getting the book off to the publisher, said, “There definitely needs to be something for interior design theory for undergraduates, but I don’t have any plans.”

If the past years and projects are any indication, Vaux will soon be involved in another project – one that combines her excitement about teaching, interior design, and research. 虽然她可以告诉你为什么我们更喜欢一个空间而不是另一个空间，或者为什么建筑规范很重要，但她总是回到人身上。 “I love interior design because while it is about the physical environment, it’s ultimately really about people.”