BA Interior Design wins Course of the Year

Earlier this month, the BA Interior Design won Course of the Year in the Teaching Awards 2025 - awards organised by our Student Union in which students nominate courses which have excelled their expectations, provided excellent teaching or helped prepare them for their future. Helen Darnell, a Senior Lecturer in Interior Design, said that the win was “absolutely amazing, it was an incredible feeling”. 

The course is taught by practising designers and architects and touches on all aspects of design, including interior architecture, exhibition design, set design and more. However, Helen partly attributed their success to initiatives beyond the course itself like their extension of Green Week and Yellow Week over the previous year. 

Green Week was created in direct response to student feedback and is meant to build confidence in articulating sustainable thinking as part of students’ design identity through lectures, studio visits, workshops and a materials market showcasing sustainable products. This year the faculty extended Green Week by introducing opening talks which focused on Interior Design & Architecture media perceptions, adaptive reuse, local resourcing, and innovative materials. They also introduced the Materials Lab for the first time - an accessible, student-centred space where material samples from over 40 design and manufacturing brands are displayed, catalogued, and regularly refreshed. Its aim is to help students better understand the environmental and social impact of the products they use and decisions they make as designers.  

The Interior Design team also created a Yellow Week to increase student confidence and in the past year, this has gone from being available to a select group to being made available to all Interior Design students. The week consists of meditation as well as sessions on neurodiversity, imposter syndrome and mental wellbeing. “People have the impression that Interior Design is quite soft and pretty, but the course is aligned with architecture so it is actually quite rigorous,” Helen said. “Students are under pressure to meet different industry standards, so we wanted to think about how to take care of student wellbeing.”

In addition to these measures, Helen highlighted the emphasis on employability as another reason for their success. Interior Design lecturer Lois Blackwell explained that opportunities are made available to students like collaborative briefs with industry professionals as well as strong support around placements, which vary from summer internships to full placement years at companies such as AEW, Kin, TP Bennet and M1nt. They also hold an annual speed networking event which allows students to meet employers and gives employers a chance to get to know students in a casual setting, as well as a mentor me scheme, in which industry figures meet approximately once a month with students to offer advice.