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Partnership Agreements Shine a Light on Interior Design

The American Society of Interior Designers announced new “friendship agreements” with two lighting industry groups this week to help consolidate public policy efforts and open up an information exchange.

We get to have our members have the benefit of their knowledge, and their members get the benefit of our knowledge.

To present a more united front on policy issues affecting the interior design and lighting design industries, the American Society of Interior Designers signed two “friendship agreements” this week with the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) and the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD).

“It is a commitment to begin to work together on common issues,” Don Davis, director of government and public affairs at ASID, said of the new partnerships, which stemmed out of a series of informal conversations among the groups at industry meetings and conferences.

“Through our conversations, we realized that the policy work that ASID is doing in code development with ICC [the International Code Council], for example, was really complementing the kind of work that IES was doing in developing new products that would meet those codes,” Davis said.

One big issue the organizations plan to tackle together is energy efficiency in lighting.

“It’s causing a lot of changes in technology and products, where some parts are being selected out and some parts are supported,” Davis said. “We’re hoping to work together on these types of policy issues, where IES has the engineering background and the lighting designers and interior designers are taking that new technology and applying it in practice in the designs that they’re doing.”

The agreements also stipulate that ASID will share information and resources with IES and IALD, and vice versa. There will, for example, be a regular exchange of newsletters to help the organizations keep each other abreast of key concerns and activities. The associations will also present at one another’s meetings and conferences.

“From ASID’s perspective, we think that IES and IALD have enormous amounts of knowledge about specifically one area of design, whereas ASID has a breadth of knowledge of all design,” Davis said.

The benefits of the agreements are collective, he added: “We get to have our members have the benefit of their knowledge, and their members get the benefit of our knowledge.”

(iStock/Thinkstock)

Katie Bascuas

By Katie Bascuas

Katie Bascuas is associate editor of Associations Now. MORE

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