There is a significantly growing discourse evolving on the topic of interiority, that calls for reconsideration of inhabitation process in our living environments, and extends its potential beyond the bounded internality of architectural spaces. The attempts of rethinking interiority challenge spatial dichotomies, promote interdependence, and offer insights from different culture and perspectives. These attempts may emerge from diverse stories of engagements with interiority. Following the previous dialog during 1st Conference on Interiority and Interior Architecture in 2014, this year conference seeks to provoke further conversation that reflects multiple perspectives on interiority.

Extending the concept of interiority provides further thinking beyond the binaries in living spaces, and allows for enquiry towards living practices situated beyond traditional configurations of public and private domains. The concept of interiority encourages the understanding of interdependence among actors, objects and spaces as emerging network rather than as separated entities. The concept of interiority also acknowledge the diversity of living practices emerged in different social and cultural contexts, each narrating their own stories.

Understanding and researching interiority call for multidisciplinary approaches, ranging from urban, architectural and interior studies, to other fields of study with pertinent concern on the tangible and intangible aspects of interiority. This conference invites global and multidisciplinary contributors to join the discourse of interiority by proposing multiple perspectives on interiority as a way to construct different stories of interior. We expect submissions within the scope of the following themes.

Encounters of Interiority

This theme seeks to explore the tools—of which interiority can be encountered with—in various phases of design and inquiry. The experience of interiority may unfold from stories narrated by a user, that articulates spatial knowledge and meaning to others. Interiority can also be encountered as a dynamic process, performed in certain rituals as well as moving in adrift. Interiority may also be actively constructed and altered through various strategies in composing the spatial choreography.

The key areas of this theme will consist of:

Recounting narratives of interiority

Performative and dynamic process of interiority

Choreographic compositions of interiority

Exploring media of interior representation

Systems of Interiority

This theme aims to understand the various mechanisms of interiority, and seeks to collect the stories that reveal these mechanisms. In understanding such mechanisms, the material qualities of interiority are important, as a platform of which interiority is experienced. It is also critical to explore how interiority evolves within its ecological system, comprising of network of actors and spaces, living and non-living things. The system of interiority could also be understood by looking at interiority as constructed by a series of responses, be it sensorial or virtual, permanent or ephemeral, and so on.

The key areas of this theme will consist of:

Constructing and materializing interiority

Ecological network of interiority

Projecting responses of interiority

Bridging physical and virtual realm of interiority

Interiority and Critical Issues of Human Inhabitation

The understanding of interiority becomes a vehicle to respond to various critical issues of human inhabitation. There is an urgent call to explore how human well-being can be achieved within the development of interiority, to enable design research and interventions towards healthy, inclusive and sustainable environment. Significant value of culture raises a question of interior-identity linkages, in particular how spatial identity can be defined—either by repetitive practices or through assigning distinctive roles and uses. The idea of interiority that is gradually extended into urban domain also calls for a concern on how interiority can be engaged, or even formed publicly, creating shared territories.

The main issues under this theme may consist of, but not limited to:

Interiority towards well-being

Inclusive and sustainable interior

Linking interior identities

Public engagement of interiority - shared territories