Professional Ethics Of Interior Designer

Like other professionals, interior designers
must contend with ethical issues. Indeed,
the issues can be quite similar to those of
allied and other learned professions. Like
architects, lawyers, and doctors, interior
designers can also do bodily harm and create
financial damage if they practice incompetently
or unethically. They can also
put people at risk by failing to be effective
advocates of their interests. Here are some
examples of these issues as they arise in interior
design practice.

• Life safety. Designers sometimes bemoan
codes and regulations, but these rules exist
to establish a minimum standard of health
and safety. Failure to meet code can delay
a project, which damages the owner, and
can also cause bodily harm.

• Confidentiality. Interior designers often
have access to confidential business information—
a planned acquisition, for example,
or a new business plan or strategy. This
knowledge is shared with interior designers
only because it has a direct bearing on
their work, and it is shared with them in
confidence. Ethically, and often by contract,
that confidence must be respected.

• Conflict of interest. Interior designers
are their clients’ agents, so they have an obligation
to avoid or disclose to them any
potential conflicts of interest. (Disclosure
means that you are prepared to end the
conflict if the client so requests.) The appearance
of conflict can be as problematic
as the reality. Just as voters worry when
politicians become too cozywith special interests,
clients start to wonder when interior
designers accept gifts or junkets from
contractors and vendors. The occasional
lunch, party, box of candy, or bottle of wine
is no problem, but all-expenses-paid vacation
trips and other costly“perks” cross the
line. They create the appearance if not the
reality that design decisions—specifying a
product, for example—are being made to
repay favors rather than to serve the interests
of the client.

• User advocacy. Interior designers have
a responsibility to users. If, in their judgment,
a project’s requirements, though
legal, compromise user comfort and performance
unacceptably, they have an obligation
to try to change them, or to resign
from the project if the client is unwilling to
make changes. Design professionals have a
broader obligation to educate their clients
on the value of design features that improve
user quality of life and performance.

• Competency. Professional competence
reflects ongoing mastery of the skills and
knowledge demanded by professional
practice. Professional certification or licensing
formally requires a level of mastery
that necessarily lags behind what
design professionals actually need. For example,
FIDER’s requirements do not yet
specify that interior designers know the
principles of sustainable design. That lag
does not excuse professional interior designers
from mastering these principles, or
any new skills that may be necessary to
maintain their professional competence.