Florida Interior Design: Update 4-8-2011
Update:
The interior design cartel has changed the wording of its online petition in response to IJ's myth-busting video! Just days after IJ released its video, the wording of the cartel's online petition was amended to withdraw the false claim that "26 states believe the health, safety and welfare of their residents requires that Interior Designers be regulated" to the more ambiguous (but still false) assertion that "While only 3 States, plus Washington DC and Puerto Rico license designers, 26 other states believe the health, safety and welfare of their residents requires that Interior Designers be regulated through various means." First, even the most charitable reading of the outdated map to which the cartel's petition links does not support the claim -- at the VERY most the number of “other (title act) states” is 20. And since the cartel does not bother to identify those states, we will: AR, AL, CT, GA, IA, IL, IN, KY, MD, ME, MN, MS, NJ, NM, NY, OK, TN, TX, VA, WI.
| This is what the site read previously: | |
 |
|
| Now the petition reads: | |
 |
|
| The IIDA map: | |
 |
|
Again, that's only 20 “other” states. Yet the cartel claims there 26 more BESIDES the 3 practice-act states (FL, LA, and NV) and Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico (which are not states). So where are the other six states? For an accurate, up-to-date list of interior design laws, click here. Note that IIDA's map is seriously out-of-date and identifies a number of states as having "Legislation Introduced" where in fact the legislation was DEFEATED and is no longer pending.
Moreover, it is false to describe interior designers in those remaining states (however many there are) as being "regulated through various means." To the contrary, all of the states listed above are "title act" states, where people who possess certain credentials (or, more often who lack those credentials but have been "grandfathered-in" anyway) are allowed to call themselves "registered," or "certified," or "licensed" interior designers. But there is absolutely no requirement to apply for "registered" status in order to practice interior design and in fact records from those states reveal that very few people even bother to apply for "registered" designer status. Neither California nor Colorado "regulate" interior designers either; instead, California is a private, voluntary, self-certifying program with no state board and no state funding, and Colorado has a permitting statue written into the architects’ law and has no interior design regulatory scheme whatsoever.
