Teaching-Learning Experiences in Interior Architecture in the Context of Creative Economy and Socially Responsible Design

The contemporary aesthetics of globalization has broken the modern idea of Interior Design and Architecture as a peripheral area dedicated to superfluous ornamentation without social, economic or political meanings. The creative economy and new emergent demands of the social and economic context for innovation and re-conceptualization of spaces and objects have now located these among of the key icons in the material culture as providers of added value in economic, functional, social and symbolic terms [1]. Thus, the Interior Architecture team of the Universidad de las Americas Puebla (UDLAP), Mexico, began to seek for new areas of opportunity for Interior Architecture to give it a renewed strength to face the contemporary, globalizing world and its demands considering also the local urgent needs to be responded through sustainable design. Thus, projects carried out in design workshops exposed in this paper, propose to break barriers that previously had maintained Interior Architecture and Design in the architectural periphery. The global creative economy and local spatial problematics are challenging that design education has to face successfully through renovated curricula, course and exercise contents but also through innovative teaching-learning methods to trigger a development of an innovative, locally sensible and socially responsible material culture promoting creative strategies and methods of production.