The Edinburgh College of Art’s Interior Design department is delighted to host the 2025 Interior Educators Conference – Imagining Interiors

‘Imagining Interiors’ is a deliberately ambiguous title, that can refer both to the process of making things up, creating, dreaming, describing and so on; and also, more literally, to the activity of making images.

In The Emergence of the Interior (2008) the interior historian Charles Rice writes of the ‘doubleness’ of the designed interior – both as a space to be occupied, and an image to be contemplated. Seventeen years on, in a world saturated by images imagined by machines, what might that doubleness actually mean? What opportunities might it present to people who design, build, and occupy – imagine – interiors?

This conference invites contributions that re-imagine interiors – that is, what interiors might be, as practice or product. These re-imaginings will be of interest to the designers, historians and theorists of interiors and to those who study its representation (imagination) in film, fiction, journalism or other media.

We invite contributions in the form of papers that might be spoken and written, and images that can be imagined and exhibited.

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. All submissions must include;

• An image, which, if selected, will join the conference exhibition. This image might be produced by the author, or by others (for example historic images), but the author should possess reproduction rights through exhibition, online, and in publication. While the finally exhibited image may exist in any medium agreed, this submission should be submitted as a PDF of a single image, and no larger than A3/10MB, at a resolution that will enable its proper examination by reviewers.
• 300-word abstract.
• 50-word author biography.

We invite authors to state the desired format of their final submission as:

• Option 1 : Conference presentation + paper of 3000 words + image for exhibition
• Option 2 : Image and abstract only, to be included in conference exhibition.

Contributions will be selected through double blind peer review. Authors of accepted abstracts and images will be invited to submit a full paper of 3000 words and/or finalised images for inclusion in the conference proceedings. Feedback from the abstract review is expected to inform this final submission.

Committees

Organising Committee

• Ed Hollis
• Dave Loder
• Gina Olsson
• Andy Siddall
• Rachel Simmonds
• Gillian Treacy

Scientific committee

• Richard Anderson	University of Edinburgh
  Glaire Anderson	University of Edinburgh
  Paramita Atmodiwijro	Universitas Indonesia
  Suzie Attiwill	RMIT University
  Susanne Bauer	University of Westminster
  Mark Dorrian	University of Edinburgh
  Carola Ebert	Berlin University of Applied Sciences
  David Grinly	Photographer
  Naomi House	Middlesex University
  Paul Kerlaff	Edinburgh Napier University
  Fiona McLachlan	University of Edinburgh
  Andy Milligan	University of Dundee
  Belinda Mitchell	University of Portsmouth
  Digger Nutter	Glasgow School of Art
  Bie Plevoets	Hasselt University
  Orit Sarfatti	Oxford Brookes University
  Ro Spankie	University of Westminster
  Lois Weinthal	Toronto Metropolitan University

Venue

The conference will be held at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to imagining.interiors@ed.ac.uk