Town Hall III Event Recap
Three topics surrounding legislation for the interior design profession were posed to the audience for consideration. Below is a list of the questions and a summary of attendees’ responses:
1. What are the perceived benefits of legislation?
- Possible pay increase
- Ability to obtain building permits and practice within our scope of services
- Established minimum competency standards
- Legislation gives you a profession
- Grow as a field/trade
- Gives client opportunity to make a qualified decision based on facts
- Separate from decorators
- Unify the profession
- Protect public health, safety, welfare
- Establish standards for sustainable design
- Decide what is right for the profession
- Public finds out when something went wrong- who protects them from interior design mistakes?
- Gain networking opportunities, educational forums, and CEU’s
2. What are the perceived challenges with legislation?
- Existing laws in other states are exclusive, not inclusive
- Cannot address legislation without unification: body of knowledge, best practices
- Existing regulation in other states is under attack/litigation
- Restriction on trade
- How do you deal with specializations: dangerous to have someone work in a specialty if they are not qualified for that specialty
- What we do is different than what the public thinks we do
- Core issue is marketing
- Cannot legislate “good” design, only competent/safe design
- Do we have the man power to execute anything we enact?
- Costs for a regulatory board
- Need a 3rd party exam and are any of the available exams truly 3rd party?
3. What are some next steps we should take?
- Establish unified marketing plan via union
- Use professional organizations to market services, like NKBA does.
- Attach to a movement to get momentum i.e. sustainable design
- Focus on ADA enforcement- it is weak
- Study regulating generally or regulating specialties
- Regulate Interior Architecture, not Interior Design
- How are other professions regulated? Law has no specialty regulation, medicine does.
- Look beyond what other states are doing. Take an academic/legal look at regulation.
- Look at Constitution and Bill of Rights. Establish something inclusive.
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