Working Space: Interiors as provisional compositions

The conference theme of occupation and constructed space facilitates an engagement with several ideas currently shaping interior design thinking, discourse and practice. Occupation, inhabitation, dwelling - the production of a place for people to inhabit, dwell, occupy - are a focus of interior design. While these terms are often used interchangeably they bring with them various theoretical frameworks and philosophical underpinnings. The term 'occupation' not only conjures ideas of residential living but is hard to prise from nuances related to military occupations, the occupation of territories, and colonialism. The conference provocation invites a thinking through the concept of 'occupation' as a way to locate some assumed givens occupying interior design as a discipline and through this, open up the potential for new ways of thinking and practising interior design which may in turn lead to different kinds of occupations and interiors.