Another aspect of relying on the government to sort out the qualified from the not, particularly with the profession of Interior Design, is that it focuses a large amount of intellectual and financial capital entirely on domestic U.S. issues…Well DUH!. OK so riddle me this. Do people living and working outside of the US do so outside? Of course not! Pretty much every living bi-pedal carbon based humanoid on this planet dwells and functions inside. OK there are the abject homeless but I would venture that even those unfortunates have some sort of shelter to seek protection from the elements. We may not consider it “inside” but who are we to say that a homeless shelter or a found object lean-to is not that person’s ideal of interior space (of course this is another issue that we must address if we are to earn the respect of the general public- sheltered and not). 

What I am trying to say is that our issues are not solely OUR issues. They are global (and from what I have heard about the interiors of alien space craft they may be Galactic- but that is another story). Certainly the Western developed world has similar issues with semantic hair-splitting between interior design, interior decoration and interior architecture. The parallel efforts are numerous. For instance I have always been fond of this organization whose focus seems to be Asia/Pacific Rim but I think they are on the right track;

http://www.ifiworld.org/#About_IFI

Don’t you think that if we all joined together to define our domain that the collective critical mass of like-minded individuals around the world could take the profession far beyond the next level, that our petty domestic semantic and turf disputes would seem rather….well petty?  Some call me a dreamer.