Why ASID Membership is No Guarantee of Quality for an Interior Designer

Long before I became a designer myself, I also believed that ASID membership was an indicator of quality and professionalism, and that one should only hire ASID designers. I grew up on the client side, and was spoonfed this point of view for decades.

Then I went to design school myself, and joined ASID as a student member, and let's just say that my opinion of the organization and its value to anyone, consumer or designer alike, took a serious nosedive for a lot of reasons.

In reality, ASID membership is only *one* way to demonstrate one's qualifications to practice interior design - and it's a pretty iffy one at that. Contrary to popular belief, and the hype that ASID aggressively promotes, entry standards for organizational membership are actually quite low, and in absolutely *no* way say anything about how good the designer actually is.

A very high percentage of current professional ASID members don't have the educational background themselves that they are now touting as the prerequisite for being considered a "professional" and trying to foist off on everyone else as a minimum standard. Several years ago, when the entry requirements were changed, they grandfathered in everyone who was already a member who wanted to remain a member, pretty much based solely on how long they'd been in practice.

To join ASID at this point, all you have to do is have a couple of years of design education, fill out a form, and send in a large check along with a copy of your transcript to prove you put in some time - and to keep sending them big checks every year. There are no references required, no other validation of skills and qualifications.

To even be a full professional member, all you have to add is passing the NCIDQ, a certification test that has been widely challenged as not even validly testing the material it purports to test for, and which has a very high failure rate, at least in part because it simply does not test for much of relevance to most designers. Most of what the NCIDQ tests for relates to commercial design matters that most residential designers will never need to know - and the reality is that most ASID members are primarily residential designers. Until this year, 2008, there wasn't even any requirement for supervised work experience to qualify to take this exam, so there have been no controls at all on the nature of the experience one has to have - or the quality of the work produced - in order to be eligible.

As we all know, any other form of certification, licensing, building codes, etc. also represents a lowest common denominator, and the reality is that the very best practitioners in every field have standards that *far* exceed the minimums set by professional organizations or even state licensing boards. Many of the very best practitioners eschew membership in these organizations for many reasons, including the fact that they fully recognize that membership in them is actually completely meaningless.

Yes, the *most* that membership in ASID proves is that the member meets a *minimum* standard - and in many cases, it doesn't even prove that much! This is hardly any kind of proof of excellence that a consumer ought to rely on!

What's more, if my experience in two different schools is any indication, the schools don't even teach most of the material the NCIDQ purports to test for! If you want to learn how to be a good designer, you've got to be a real self-starter and do a *lot* of individual research and investigation, on an ongoing basis, reading voraciously on your own, going to CEU classes whether you're required to or not for professional designations, asking lots and lots of questions of vendors, contractors, and other professional resouces. No degree can possibly prepare a person fully to practice in this profession - it's sweat equity that builds the qualifications, just being out there in the trenches. Formal education can certainly be a good thing and add a lot, but it also often tends to seriously stifle creativity. Thus, it's certainly no panacea and should not be a sole prerequisite for selecting a designer - nor should seeking one with professional designations that rely on such backgrounds. No list of initials following a person's name can possibly indicate their dedication to excellence and ongoing learning, or their taste and ability to pull off whatever a client needs to have done - but careful interviewing of the prospective designer will certainly bring all of that out, as will checking their references and looking at their work.

In reality, there are many superb interior designers who you won't find if you try to look them up through ASID - but you *will* certainly find them published in all the major magazines, creating the best rooms in local showhouses, working for the biggest and wealthiest clients - and through word of mouth when speaking with other clients who know good design and good designers when they see them.

It would be absolutely insane to hire *any* designer without fully investigating their portfolio and references, and seeing if you just plain get along with them - the very same investigative process any well-informed consumer would follow when selecting *any* kind of professional to do work for them.

According to recent estimates, only about 10% of the ASID membership holds professional status in the organization - and that represents at most approximately 3% of all interior designers in the country. Design schools are graduating many, many more designers every year, though, and that's not even counting the thousands who come to the industry through myriad other backgrounds that qualify them just as fully, if not more so, and clearly, most of them are *not* joining ASID. Even if you do decide to hire an ASID designer, you should still check them out thoroughly, so why limit your options so much?

The truth is that quality will show, with or without membership in organizations like ASID, and a client who decides to limit himself to ASID designers only may well miss out on finding the perfect designer for himself, just by looking at an extremely artificially-narrowed field of choices.

ASID: An Agency Out of Control

http://cotedetexas.blogspot.com/2008/06/asid-agency-out-of-control.html

See this great blog post about how Kelly Wearstler, Juan Montoya, and other prominent interior designers have been issued Cease and Desist orders in the state of Florida for practicing interior design without a license.

Since Florida is one of three states with a practice act, which is a form of legislation prohibiting the practice of interior design without a license promulgated by ASID, several of the most prominent designers in the US today cannot legally practice there. They are considered unqualified, dontcha know - despite their astronomical success elsewhere.

ASID really has gone off the deep end in promoting and supporting this kind of legislation nationwide. Well-established designers like Wearstler or Montoya may think they are protected, but if these kinds of laws pass elsewhere, we will just see a repeat in every state that has such legislation of precisely this kind of idiocy.

Why I Belong to Professional Interior Design Organizations - and What's Wrong With Them

I like belonging to professional organizations mainly because of the networking and educational opportunities. While I am highly opposed to any sort of mandatory licensing of interior designers, I do still very much believe in increasing our knowledge base so that we can do the very best job we can for our clients. If nothing else, there are so many new products and product categories coming out every day that we've got to have *some* way of staying abreast of new developments just so we can always offer the cutting edge to our clients.

I do think that having some kind of initials after one's name does lend a certain air of "legitimacy" that *some* clients seek, but the longer I am in this business, the more I realize how little that really matters to most prospective and existing clients.

More importantly, I've also realized how little those initials actually mean in terms of "proof" of competency of any sort.

Many of the very best designers I know and know of would never qualify for membership in these organizations - and at the same time, I hate to say it, but some of the absolute *worst* design work I've seen has been done by ASID professional members. It seems as if there is almost an inverse relationship in many cases between the presence of letters after a designer's name and the quality of his or her work.

I've also noticed that many of the people who tend to be most actively involved in the leadership of these organizations in particular are generally not the best designers around. The *really* best ones are clearly far too busy doing what they do to be bothered with meetings and all of the petty politics and so on that the organizations also bring with them.

Being a good designer requires a mix of technical knowledge and creativity. Anyone with a brain can learn the technical material just by reading books and various industry publications, or on the job (lord knows that almost nothing of what I know was taught to me in school), but the creativity that really gives one an edge and defines what an interior designer is at core cannot be taught and is innate. Education can foster it and bring it out further, but it cannot instill it where there is no fundamental underlying facility.

In a well-run professional organization that is truly responsive to the actual needs and preferences of the majority of its membership base, these groups can also be very powerful proponents of a profession, and do a lot of good.

However, when a small percentage of the leadership and membership decides that they speak for a majority and stand for a position that will actually *harm* the majority of their own membership base, as ASID is doing, then that organization has outlived its usefulness and should be shot and put out of its misery. It most assuredly should not be allowed to create legislation or internal policies that will adversely affect the lives - and livelihoods - of thousands of people the way it is trying to do nationwide without giving them all a direct say, especially if it is going to use their dues money to fund these initiatives.

Once an organization has gone out of control and is running amok wreaking havoc on the very constituency it ought to (and claims to) be serving, it completely loses all legitimacy and credibility.

So why do I continue to belong to one of these groups that is out of control when I obviously have so little respect for it? Mainly because my boss basically made it a requirement of my employment, but also because I'm somewhat of a Pollyanna at heart, and am still (almost undoubtedly naively) hopeful that I can help the organization "see the light" and correct course to be what it used to be and *ought* to be - a real resource for its membership.