Interior Design and Its Impact On Our Well-Being with Prof. MaDonna Collingwood

A cluttered environment has been shown to deplete energy and have a detrimental impact on our overall mood and self-image. However, numerous interior design techniques and approaches have been found to relieve stress levels. But, what’s more to it? How do the elements of interior design improve our health? Studio Institute Denver Founder and Professor MaDonna Collingwood explores how interior design impacts our physical, and mental health and well-being. Studio Institute Denver offers accelerated programs in interior design and construction management. She helps individuals who are pursuing a career change while still working to keep daily expenses. Professor MaDonna Collingwood teaches students everything they need to know to begin a career in the building trades without the need for expensive college tuition. To know more about what they do, listen to this podcast on Actions Antidote. --- Listen to the podcast here: Interior Design and Its Impact On Our Well-Being with Prof. MaDonna Collingwood Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I’d like to once again talk to you about career change. Now, a lot of people find themselves in a place in life where they need to make some sort of a career change because whatever you’re doing right now isn’t working, and one of the prospects that a lot of people run into is this idea that, to make a new career, you have to go back to school and get a whole new degree, which is not only really time consuming but also consuming a lot of money. And I think one of the best phrases I’ve heard from people looking at that option and says, “Okay, that’s great. Now, who’s gonna pay my mortgage? Who’s gonna pay my rent during this whole four-year period when I’m going back to school and pursuing something completely different?” Today, my guest is Professor MaDonna Collingwood and she started an organization called the Studio Institute Denver and what makes this one a little bit different than the ones that I had previously engaged with is it’s not tech focused, it actually helps people who want to move away from technology and build a career in the trades. --- Professor MaDonna, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining today. Now, let’s start off by telling my audience a little something about the Studio Institute Denver. What is it all about and how does the programming work? It’s a 6- to 12-month accelerated trade school. I have two programs, one in interior design and one in construction management. We do mostly night classes hybrid so some are online, some are in person, some are both, and then we do a little bit of daytime on Fridays. So, most of my students work full time and then they go to class at night. So your core audience, your core crowd are people who are pursuing a career change while still working full time and so they don’t have to really deal with some of those issues of, “How am I gonna keep the lights on? How am I gonna pay my rent?” and stuff? Right, and I record every class and every lecture and then I send out a virtual link as well so they can always join and I’ll share my screen and they can watch the whole class from home so if they have to work late or they can’t make it in for whatever reason, they can still attend. You probably have a lot of people who have interesting schedules that can be variant. Do you end up having a lot of students who also have childcare duties, like taking care of kids and stuff like that, that can make it even more challenging to make any kind of a career change? I do. It’s a trade school so the ages of my students really varies a lot. It goes from 18 to like mid 50s right now. Yeah, a few of my students are parents so they’ve got to pick their kids up from school and everything so they can only attend at certain times or on certain days. Not bad. And take us a little bit through the story of the kind of person that comes into your program. I know that age 18 is probably people coming straight out of high school that just want an alternative to going to college, but some of the older students, are they people that oftentimes have a career, are they often at a point where they’re just like, “I just need something else,” is there some sort of breaking point that happens with a lot of the people that you see come in? For a lot of my second career students, it’s not so much of like a complete career change but they want to combine it with the career that they have now, so a lot of them will be real estate agents and they want to flip houses or they want to stage and a lot of them right now are in the spa industry so they’re focused on human health and wellbeing so they’re looking at getting a WELL Building certificate from me, or learning how to design and do occupancy-focused designs. Oh, wow. So you’re saying you have a lot of people who are taking your programs to enhance the careers they already have, which makes it a little bit less of a conflict in people’s heads, because some of the people in these continuing education courses, they have a job and they know that their program is trying to get them to leave their job but they’re still doing this job that they don’t really want to be doing so you have people who are kind of combining this almost holistically into a path and saying, “Okay, this interior design course is gonna help me further what I’m doing currently with real estate or anything else.” Right. Interior Design ties into a lot of their industries that people might not think about, but you can really expand on a lot of careers with an interior design certificate. Oh, wow. What are the other kinds of careers that people might not be thinking about? Definitely health, human health and wellbeing, also anything really in like the energy sustainability, green building. We focus on that a lot as well. Definitely the real estate industries with staging, fix and flips. Anybody who takes my course and gets a certificate can basically skip on hiring a general contractor, which is somebody who is necessary and licensed but they contract out a lot of work so they’re hiring people and then charging a fee on top of it, so if you have my certificate, you can be that middle person and then you don’t have to pay extra for it. And you mentioned this health and wellbeing. What do you see as the connection between, let’s say, someone’s even talking about their own home personally, the connection between what people are surrounded in their environment and the mental health, wellbeing, whatever you want to call it, in your own life? So I follow the WELL Building standard which is an accredited organization that’s accompanied with LEED, Leadership and Environmental and Energy Design, so the WELL Building standard, they have a residential code that you can follow and it goes through everything from lighting to HVAC to flooring, the materials that you’re using, the emissions, and then it goes even further into movement, walkability, circulation paths, so it’s kind of how all of these smaller elements that you might not think about can really have an impact on your physical and mental health and wellbeing. So you’re saying that there’s so many things people don’t really think about on a day-to-day basis but maybe having a significant impact on wellbeing, whether it be something, I’m just imagining, I’m just even looking over at my house and seeing what possibly could be in a walking path that causes that little bit of frustration that people don’t think about because then you just move on but what you’re seeing is that that can add up a bit. Exactly. Really, with the lighting a lot, because certain types of lighting can give you headaches or certain types of lighting that create maybe like a little bit of background noise that most people wouldn’t notice but it does have an impact on you, especially someone who is autistic, if they’re in a school building and they have that background noise from the lighting that might impact them differently. Also, their circadian lighting design so the color of the lighting at certain times of the day, like you can see it on your iPhone, it changes automatically after whatever time it is, 9 p.m. or 10 p.m., it goes to more of a red instead of a blue, so that kind of lighting design can be done in homes and it’ll improve your quality of life overall but definitely your sleep quality. Interesting. And this seems like pretty recent research, or at least I’ve only been hearing about this the last five or six years, in the sense of like us understanding, I remember when I first started hearing all about what the blue light on your phone was doing and they started recommending you actually put the phone out of your bedroom in another room so it doesn’t interfere with your sleep. Is this something more people are becoming aware of and more people are thinking about over time or is this something that’s been around way longer that I just idiotically haven’t been aware of like 10, 20 years ago? Well, LEED has been around since the 90s and that was really the focus on the environment and energy and emissions and then WELL is an extension of LEED, so we’re keeping those same standards that we’ve had since the 90s for energy and the environment and then building on it to also include people, because that is important. I think that WELL started, it’s relatively new, maybe 2017, 2018, so if you follow the WELL Building standard now, you’re getting all of the necessary requirements for energy and efficiency and then also you’re thinking about the health of the end user. That makes sense. And so the other thing I’m wondering about this is that if someone in their day-to-day life just starts observing that they’re getting headaches, say,...