Resilience in interior architecture education: Distance universal design learning in the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected all levels of education all over the World. In Turkey, on March 16, 2020, the decision of distance education was taken in higher education sharply. This necessity had caused urgent adaptation to the distance education process, which resulted in changing the courses’ curriculums in parallel with the emergence of new teaching and learning strategies especially in applied programs such as interior architecture. This process has tested the ‘resilience’ of the education system explicitly. Resilience means an ability of a community, system, or individual to ‘adapt’ and ‘transform’ in the case of varied facts causing any disruptive situation in the existing system. The pandemic has taught the education community about ‘adaptation’ and ‘transformation’ through implementing diverse learning tools and responses to complex circumstances, especially in applied courses. With the end of the pandemic, the instructors experiencing the face-to-face education environment anew will sustain it with the lessons from the pandemic undoubtedly. This study aims to discuss the concept of ‘resilience’ with its basic dimensions, ‘adaptation’ and ‘transformation’, in interior architecture education by focusing on the experiences, limitations, and potentials experienced in the distance education process. It specifically dwells on teaching and learning experiences of Universal Design (UD) course conducted in the Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design, Atılım University, Ankara in the 2020 Spring term when the first and urgent adaptation to distance education had been experienced. The evaluation process is supported with the obtained qualitative data, with results suggesting that all students gained useful insights by experiencing multiple dialogue environments in various ways of learning into how they can incorporate inclusivity into future designs. This study displays that it is crucial that the distance UD learning process open to interactive dialogue among students, experts, instructors, and users to design inclusive spaces welcoming all people without discrimination. It argues that there have been potential improvements about adaptation and transformations of educational approaches within the pandemic, but in interior architecture education as applied design education, the importance and necessity of experiential learning in bodily and collective communication has been deeply proven.