On Friday, October 8, and Saturday, October 9, 2021, an audience of 158 design educators, students, and practitioners attended NYSID’s Teaching Green Symposium, the first sustainability symposium focusing on interior design education ever. Said David Sprouls, president of NYSID, “We designed this symposium to create a circular dialogue between students, instructors, and practitioners. . .We opened it up to educational institutions all over the country, because this issue is much bigger than NYSID.” Teaching Green, a hybrid online and in-person event, was co-curated by Barbara Weinreich, NYSID’s director of graduate programs, and David Bergman, director of NYSID’s MPS in Sustainable Interior Environments. It was underwritten by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The symposium opened with a conversation between keynote speaker Aviniash Rajagopal, editor-in-chief of Metropolis magazine, and Andrew Revkin, renowned environmental journalist and the founding director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University. Rajagopal described the huge impact interior design has on carbon emissions through the practice of frequent renovation. Keynote speaker and NYSID alumna Jennifer Graham ’85 (BFA), principal and senior project manager at Perkins&Will, was in conversation with Seema Lisa Pandya, the faculty member who teaches NYSID’s Introduction to Sustainability & the Built Environment course. Graham emphasized how closely intertwined issues of climate, health, and equity are within sustainability. In the closing keynote, Eric Corey Freed, vice president of sustainability for CannonDesign, was in conversation with David Bergman. Freed said, “The traditional way that we make things is to. . .harvest stuff at great environmental cost and slowly turn it into trash. The circular economy proposes an alternative for that. . . .Instead of making waste, it’s harvest, make, and remake over and over again.”

Nadia Elrokhsy, director of the Interior Design AAS Program and associate professor of ecological design at Parsons, attended the symposium as both a presenter and an audience member. She noted that despite the many presenters and wide range of expertise at the event, the student roundtable (hosted by Taneshia Albert of Auburn University) was the most revelatory talk for her. “Hearing from students in this way was a rare opportunity,” Elrokhsy says. “In the early days of my teaching (of what was then called Green Design), students didn’t grasp their role in the larger scheme of climate change, but now I am seeing that students have a better understanding of their power to address this large and complex problem. The students felt empowered to use quantitative and qualitative analysis to create evidence-based designs that lower the carbon footprint of an interior over its lifecycle.”

All Teaching Green Symposium presentations can be viewed on NYSID’s YouTube channel.