IIDA’s Design Your World Empowers Students, Enriches the Design Profession
Registration is now open for the fifth annual “Design Your World” program, organized by the International Interior Design Association (IIDA). Held in four different cities, the two-week summer program immerses students in the fundamentals of design, with instruction provided by experienced design professionals.
Chicago section instructor Chelsea Jackson-Greene, an associate and interior designer with Perkins&Will, recently shared with i+s the importance of connecting students with the environment where Design Your World programs are held. By engaging students in a hands-on way, the program expands their awareness of their creative potential, their problem-solving capabilities, and the tangible impact that the design profession can make across all walks of life.
Last year, as IIDA put out a call for design professionals to lead multiple city programs, Jackson-Greene’s reputation for academic volunteering and networking led colleagues at Perkins&Will (a corporate sponsor for Design Your World) to recommend her as an instructor for the 2024 Chicago session. “I’m passionate about design education,” she said. “I was excited about the opportunity to bring professional experience to how the curriculum was taught. Last year was really fun for me, and I’m excited they asked me to come back this year.”
Connecting students with specialists during a two-week intensive exposes them to real-world challenges and offers practical insights they might not have access to in a general art education setting.
Creative Beginnings
As the inaugural case, Chicago’s program has been running since 2021, when it first launched as a virtual opportunity. Since then, Design Your World’s in-person education has expanded to Miami, St. Louis, and now Dallas in 2025. Details of the various host sites and instructors will be added to the IIDA’s Design Your World information page as they are finalized.
According to Jackson-Greene, city section facilitators start with a shared curriculum formula. “Similar to when students go to art and design school, we start with big general ideas—the foundations of design—before diving into anything specific for their final project,” she explained.
While the core educational framework remains consistent, each city adapts the final project to incorporate locally relevant sites that students can physically visit.
Speaking of the Chicago experience, she said location makes a big difference in the project site selection. The 2024 Chicago section was held at Columbia College, where the students were tasked with redesigning zones of the student center.
Preferably, she said, “We can walk to the site and experience the city’s energy. Students can see what their future might look like if they decide to apply to an art and design school, and it relates directly to their final project. It’s really engaging for them to see something tangible they can reimagine themselves.”
This year, Chicago’s Design Your World section will be hosted downtown at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with the final project site forthcoming.
Guest speakers, local firms, and showroom staff also participate in the program, giving students a well-rounded view into the design industry while they discover and find confidence in their creativity, build up critical thinking skills, work in teams, and turn vision into reality.
The Future by Design
Applying what they learn during Design Your World programs has proven to open up students’ post-secondary school considerations. This opportunity creates a pipeline to design education, with plenty of examples of past students later attending design schools. Occasionally, success stories come in the form of those who didn’t even have a design education or career on their radar.
“We had a student last year [Ethan Garza], who joined the program because a friend was participating… He said, ‘'I don’t know anything about design. I’m not into it.’ Yet he ended up having one of the most interesting projects of all,” Jackson-Greene recalled, beaming. “His feedback was, ‘I didn’t know this was possible for me, let alone that I could learn this from others or be inspired by them.’” Now an architecture student at Harold Washington College, Garza is returning to the Chicago Design Your World program this summer as a teaching assistant.
Garza is just one such example. IIDA has maintained solid connections with Design Your World program alumni and often taps them for assistance, like Naomi Mekonnen, who attended the first Chicago section, went on to study interior design at Indiana University, and has returned as a program teaching assistant. Last fall, Mekonnen and other alumni discussed their experiences and how the program’s emphasis on bringing together a diverse set of participants and instructors contributed to their personal growth, challenged their skills, and informed their future plans.
“Representation in our industry is really important. It’s crucial for students to see possible futures for themselves when planning their educational and career goals,” Jackson-Greene noted. “It’s hard to imagine a future when you might not know anyone who looks like you or comes from a similar background who has done something like this.”
