A coding and analysis of the content of the Interior Design accreditation standards (Council for Interior Design Accreditation (CIDA)) utilized over the last twenty years revealed a marked increase in information literacy requirements. The standards used in 1989 required only that students have an awareness that research techniques were used by professional interior designers, whereas current accreditation standards require that students’ work demonstrates an ability to gather appropriate and necessary research findings to solve design problems, evaluate the relevance and reliability of information and research, effectively distill and communicate data and research, appropriately apply theories of human behavior to design solutions, and to express ideas clearly in written communication. Faced with a challenge to meet program accreditation standards at at institution with little to no formal information-literacy building coursework in the general education curriculum, we determined a need to build a collaborative relationship between program faculty and librarian partner.
Two interior design faculty and one faculty librarian met several times to discuss how information literacy could be injected into the existing interior design curriculum. Courses at the freshman, sophomore, and senior levels were identified, which could accommodate a writing or a research component and simultaneously incorporate one or more learning outcomes routed in the ACRL Information Literacy Framework.
This presentation will outline the need for librarians to partner with faculty to map the ACRL Information Literacy Framework across the interior design curriculum, methods for completing the mapping process, recommendations for implementation and assessment, as well as ways a similar project could be adapted at other schools for different program areas.
