An Introduction to Academic Education of Interior Design in Iran; Changes in Curriculum during the Foundation

It is almost 60 years from the establishment of the Decorative Arts Faculty in Iran, which was the beginning of the academic education of interior design. After the revolution educating interior design encountered an interruption for about three decades, and that is one of the main reasons for the forgotten history. Nowadays after the reestablishment of the interior design education, there is a considerable lack of information about the past. The main questions are about features of the genesis period. What was the curriculum? How did the educators perform it? Is there any revision about it? Is there any exam for entrances? If there is, what were the subjects? What is the reason for the interruption? And so many questions like these. The first step is to determine the research sources. There are five main subjects about the questions: general information such as the beginning and the last year, subjects about the university programs and decisions for curriculums, information about the students such as their ability, information about graduated students at the profession and the society. Another important factor in questions is Time. Therefore, there are two main factors: Subject and Time. Several papers have already addressed the history of interior design education, however, they do not provide clear answers to such questions. For this research, the main sources are in two types: written and oral. At the first steps of the research, all written sources were studied. Lack of information made it impossible to find out the story of the past; therefore, the best approach was to investigate another type of sources, i.e. oral testimonies. For the purpose of comparison, oral testimonies are more important than the other types of sources because of the “mortality”. They will be lost forever by neglecting. Oral history research and accumulating the oral testimonies is a specialized field in historical studies that has its own subtleties. Oral history, like any other research, has two theoretical and practical fields. Synchronization of theoretical foundations and implementation of the plan leads to a better understanding of theoretical issues and, in some cases, to a more precise prediction of the practical section and the mitigating the errors. In this paper, I describe the abstract of studies on the oral history research methodology in terms of the program used for this project. By reviewing and summarizing the documents, it will be noted that using the criterion of continuity in education, interior design education in Iran is divided into the period of development and the new era. Its developmental period consists of two parts: stability and crisis. It is necessary to know the characteristics of these two for any fundamental research that qualifies for qualitative assessment. This research can be continued in the form of completion of basic information or critical and analytical review.