Interior design, like other applied disciplines, has a clear career cycle requiring education and professional experience before becoming eligible for examination. Internships are often encouraged in academic curriculums for increased career placement and enhancement of student learning outcomes; they also serve as a benchmark for academic programs to evaluate their curriculum and its relevance to practice. As the design industry rapidly shifts the scope and needs in projects, it becomes more difficult for academic programs to assess practitioners' values as they relate to recent interns and entry‐level hires. Using a social constructivist approach, this longitudinal study aims to better understand practitioners' perceptions of soft and hard skill sets necessary for emerging interior design professionals. This study utilizes content analysis to evaluate practitioners' responses (N = 260) from 2006 to 2014 through a survey questionnaire that consisted of open‐ended questions aimed to evaluate senior‐level interior design students' performance during the required 400‐hour internship at a mid‐sized Southeastern university. The findings showed that soft skills were more often listed as positive attributes where interns performed exceedingly well. Furthermore, soft skills affected the willingness of practitioners to hire interns.

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This paper compares the efficacy of four digital drawing tools-mouse, iPad, Wacom Cintiq, and Bamboo 1 -when measured by user perception of technical and esthetic quality outcomes. The tools were assessed through the experiences of 20 senior-level undergraduate students majoring in interior design. The results indicate the mouse was preferred overall, contradicting previous studies showing students' preference for digital drawing tablets. However, as we show, drawing is an affordance-based interaction that is influenced by participants' prior experience with both hand and digital drawing tools. We therefore propose a grounded-theory model underscoring the importance of hand-eye-interface (HEI) and layout and orientation (LO) in supporting successful introduction of any new drawing tool. Further implications of the HEI-LO model suggest facilitating learning with multiple opportunities to use a wide range of tools to embed experiences in long-term memory, strengthen learned conventions, and promote positive affordances for both hand and digital media.

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