A+ Teachers

Five exceptional interior design educators reveal what’s going on behind their classroom doors.
By Karina Sanchez

Excerpted from Perspective, the journal of the International Interior Design Association, fall 2006

Design educators are not only responsible for inspiring creativity and preparing students for a career, but also are expected to be counselors and disciplinarians at the same time. Many teachers thrive under the pressure, creating names for themselves in their respected colleges and universities, as well as in the interior design industry. Perspective reached out to five outstanding design educators to learn their personal teaching methods and understand the issues that are important to today’s students.

“The Holistic Designer”
Neal Hubbell
School: Kansas State University
Location: Manhattan, Kansas
Years Teaching: 14

Neal Hubbell, departmental associate head and associate professor for Kansas State University’s Department of Interior Architecture and Product Design, made a transition into design education in the early 1980s after working with several architecture firms. Since then, he’s never looked back. After eight years of architecture practice, he enrolled in graduate school at the University of Texas, where he earned a master’s degree in architecture. It was while working as a teaching assistant there that he realized teaching was his true calling.

The university’s five-year interior architecture program integrates interior architecture, product design and furniture design. Students are expected to take 10 studios and three furniture workshop courses. “The idea is to create a stronger, more holistic designer,” Hubbell says.

It’s in the studios where a holistic designer can really flourish. Hubbell encourages students to never stop designing. Students have so much learning to do, he says, and his biggest reward is taking them beyond their own expectations. “I keep pushing them throughout the entire process of a project. And the key is to never stop thinking about design-in every aspect of it, whether it be the largest thing or the tiniest detail,” he says.

Throughout his years of teaching, Hubbell has seen his students’ interests evolve. While his students in the early ‘90s were interested in computer-aided design, now, so much of a student’s life is inundated by computer technology that today’s students are moving beyond this trend. “I think the next evolution is going to be in green design,” he says. “It’s going to be transformative. It’s going to change not only the materials and the products that we specify, but ultimately, even methods of construction.”