Pratt Institute

Brooklyn Campus *room TBD*

Symposium: Friday, November 6, 2026    

9 am-6 pm EST (EST)

This event will be live-streamed

 

initial submissions due: Friday, May 22 2026 @ 5PM EDT

*submission portal link to be provided*
 

This year’s symposium will consist of lecture presentations, roundtables by participants, and an exhibition (to be physically present on the Pratt campus).

We encourage design practitioners, historians, and theorists in and beyond academia to engage in this year’s discussion.

 

theme: #synthetic

The oldest and most etymologically faithful sense: synthetikos, skilled in putting together. An interior is fundamentally a synthetic artifact, an assembly of disparate elements (surfaces, objects, light, programs, bodies) composed into a legible whole. Those interiors have histories; narratives that make and remake them, real and perceived.

What makes them #synthetic? Are they copies? Produced by codes or rules? Perceived to be unnatural? Simply not present? Each association carries its own freight, different questions about how the whole is assembled. 

We ask participants to skillfully put together their research and interrogate these varied associations: to locate, within the #synthetic interior, the standards, assumptions, and conventions that shape what we recognize as whole

Proposals should embrace one of the following subthemes:

 

## 1. The Synthetic Designer (or Author)

What is an interior when its creation is automated? As just one example: AI systems now generate floor plans, render photorealistic interiors, and propose spatial arrangements from text prompts alone: designs drawn from vast corpuses of prior human design, yet produced without the embodied spatial knowledge, social intuition, or ethical commitments that have historically defined the discipline. What values are embedded (and whose are excluded) in the data and code that produce these environments? Are these processes collaboration or appropriation (or both)? Are questions about a maker’s autonomy new? This node invites investigations of design agents and their precedents (architectural treatises, pattern books, collecting and interior decorating manuals, trade literature, other rule-based systems), and their implications for authorship, labor, professionalization, and disciplinary identity in interior design.

 

## 2. The Synthetic Environment

The planetarium recreates the universe in a room: designed not to shelter but to transport. They belong to a long lineage of environments engineered to produce an experience of outside inside: the cyclorama, the diorama, the world's fair pavilion, the botanical conservatory, the reconstructed cave at a natural history museum. Each is a physically inhabited space whose interior surfaces and atmospheres are composed to produce a credible, or deliberately incredible, elsewhere. This node invites proposals that examine the logics, strategies, and politics of physically immersive unnatural environments and the forms of knowledge, wonder, and ideology they produce.

 

## 3. The Synthetic Surface

Trompe l'oeil, faux bois, marbling, gilding, laminates: the interior has always trafficked in surfaces that pretend to be something other than what they are. They may be a substitute for an existing material or a response to new needs or ambitions. These are sites where material hierarchies, class aspirations, and ideas about authenticity are made legible (or illegible). This node invites proposals examining the long history and contemporary evolution of simulated materials in interior environments and the economies/ legacies of taste, value, and deception they sustain or upend. 

 

Each node is designed as a clear conceptual center with a contestable boundary: specific enough to generate focused proposals, open enough to invite interpretation from historians, theorists, and practitioners across the streams of the symposium.

 

Initial submissions are to include: 

abstracts based on original, unpublished research (no more than 300 words)

one to three images (required)

2-page CV, with contact information

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Participants in each roundtable will consist of presenters within one of the subthemes listed above.

If you are interested in participating in the exhibition, please prepare the materials listed above and indicate “exhibition” at the time of the submission (see below). The exhibition will consist primarily of 2D work; any 3D proposals will require self-funding for fabrication and shipping.

 

Please combine all the submission materials into one multi-page PDF, named yourlastname_yourinstitution.pdf. Please do not send final submissions via email: no submissions will be accepted outside the submission portal. When submitting your proposal through the portal, please indicate whether the presentation is to be considered (1) history/theory, (2) practice/theory, or (3) exhibition in the “proposal description” field. 

 

Selected lecture proposals will be developed into full papers to be presented in person at Pratt Institute. The exhibition will be composed of selected proposals via the submission portal and invited artists/ designers/ makers from the Pratt community.

Any questions should be directed to Interiorprovocations@gmail.com. 

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All text above was co-written and edited by Interior Provocations & claude.ai.

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​​​Organizers:

Anca Lasc

Erica Morowski

Deborah Schneiderman

Keena Suh

Karin Tehve

Karyn Zieve

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​Image Credit: Interior Provocations Team + Midjourney