Bottleneckers. William Mellor
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portrayed licensure as “professionally unnecessary” and best left to occupations that required science and mathematical skills, like architecture, as a former chairman of NSID later wrote to the New York Times.15 With the industry divided on regulation, none of the bills passed into law.
Upon the legislative failure, AID and NSID regrouped to better organize their efforts. They began by merging in 1975 to form ASID, becoming, with thirteen thousand members, the world’s largest interior design association.16 According to one commentator, the new organization “consider[ed] itself an exclusive group” in which “membership to frustrated housewives and exiled princesses [was] not available on demand.”17
The core of ASID’s efforts was the development of model legislation—funded by a $13,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts18—and a detailed plan for a state-by-state campaign to regulate interior designers.19 The plan called for the “establishment and maintenance of a state-wide interior design society in each state where none now exists. The state society should be the vehicle for conducting the legislative program and public dialogue on the licensing issue.”20 The guidelines also stressed the importance of determining how to raise and distribute funds, producing “educational” (i.e., lobbying) materials for use by legislators, conducting personal lobbying, establishing priority states, and coordinating the effort nationally.21
ASID wasted no time in implementing the recommendations. In 1976, in an attempt to coordinate efforts, it adopted a policy that required state chapters to seek permission from the national organization to pursue regulation in their respective states. That same year, the Florida chapter was granted permission to do so.22 Four years later, ASID established a state legislative network to equip state chapters in licensing efforts.23 The creation of the state network coincided with plans for a national campaign, kicked off in 1985, to support state-by-state regulation of interior designers. ASID announced the start of the campaign at a well-attended press conference, with its then president, Gail Hayes Adams, declaring, “In our role as the leader of the design profession, ASID has declared title registration its top priority in 1986.”24 The campaign included training and resources provided to state chapters by the national organization and the commitment of $275,000 in the first year alone to fund the efforts.25 By then, ASID could count twenty-eight thousand of the nation’s two hundred thousand interior designers among its membership.26
The campaign’s launch was aided by the fact that three states had already adopted titling laws, one in each of the three preceding years—Alabama in 1982, Connecticut in 1983, and Louisiana in 1984.27 The experience of working with the state chapters, which had in each case been instrumental in the adoption of legislation, was invaluable for the national ASID organization, as it worked to craft and implement the national campaign.
The first state to adopt a titling law as a result of the national campaign—and after years of lobbying on the part of its ASID chapter—was Florida in 1988.28 New Mexico followed a year later, also as a result of intensive campaigning by the national and state divisions of the ASID.29 Apart from Florida the other states that adopted titling laws throughout the 1980s were small, but 1990 saw three of the nation’s largest states take up such regulations—California, Illinois, and New York.30 New York’s passage of the bill was particularly noteworthy, given New York City’s status as the fashion-and-design capital and the onerous certification requirements—a minimum of seven years of education and training and two examinations.31 This victory for the bottleneckers came as a result of a vigorous five-year campaign by a coalition of four design associations led by the state ASID chapter with support from New York City’s Office of Business Development.32
Whereas most of ASID’s efforts were focused on title acts, 1987 saw Washington, DC, pass the nation’s first practice act under the influence of ASID.33 Practice acts go a step further than titling laws, legally restricting interior design work to those who have earned a license, the requirements of which are often the same as those of title acts. As with the title acts in New York and other states, the practice act in Washington, DC, came about after years of intense pressure from the interior design community.
In 1983, an interior design coalition had formed in DC with the initial goal of achieving a titling law.34 The coalition included members of ASID and other design organizations,35 nonaffiliated designers, and educators and students from area colleges and universities with interior design programs.36 It hired an attorney to craft a bill and focused its lobbying efforts on the mayor and nine members of the city council.37 The lobbying effort required the coalition to remain active in DC’s political process and to donate to individual council members’ election campaigns.38 Even the manner in which the coalition donated to political campaigns was strategic: it maximized the number of people donating and presented them in such a way as to suggest a greater constituency. As one leader of the coalition explained, “It demonstrated the breadth of the support, so it was better to have a list of 100 donors rather than two big contributors.”39
Similarly, when the proposed bill entered a phase for review by a council committee, numerous coalition members testified at a contentious public hearing about the need to protect public health and safety by regulating interior designers.40 Their assertions were refuted by city officials, among others. Deputy Mayor Carol Thompson, then director of the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, told the council that licensing designers was unnecessary and redundant: “This industry does not provide services . . . essential to the well-being of the residents of the District of Columbia.”41 Likewise, Valerie Barry, head of the Occupational and Professional Licensure Administration, opposed the measure, calling it an “unnecessary government intervention.”42
Nevertheless, after the hearing, council member John Wilson changed the bill from a titling law to a practice act, citing the need to better protect the public. Based on the committee’s approval, council members approved the bill on the first vote in October 1987. The congressional review approved the bill, and the mayor signed it into law.43 Upon the law’s adoption, a five-member board was created, composed almost entirely of bottleneckers. The membership included three interior designers, one interior design educator, and one consumer, all appointed by the mayor.44
The payoff for the bottleneckers was immediate. One of the first appointees to the board was Martha Cathcart, the president of a local interior design firm and an active member of the coalition that had lobbied for the bill’s creation.45 Designers also saw the new Washington, DC, practice act as a momentum builder. At the time of its passage, almost two dozen other states were considering interior design regulation,46 and design activists were hopeful about the DC bill’s effect. As one regulation proponent said, “It’s a long, uphill battle. . . . Hopefully, this will have a domino effect.”47
Whether DC’s law actually set a domino effect in motion is unknown, but the rapid pace with which states began to adopt interior design regulations suggests that it may indeed have done so. Between 1991 and 2002, eleven states passed titling laws, and three instituted practice acts. Although design regulation enthusiasts chalked the new legislation up to an increased awareness among consumers and legislators “about interior designers’ responsibilities for the public’s health, safety, and welfare,”48 the true impetus was relentless lobbying by the bottleneckers. This can be seen in the example of Alabama converting its titling law into a practice act in 2001, upon which a leader in the state’s design coalition acknowledged the efforts by state activists in support of the transition and also noted that “it was ASID that provided the constant focus for us and kept us steady in our efforts until we were successful.”49 And when New Jersey created its titling law in 2002, a coalition leader said,
I am not sure we would have achieved passage of the [bill] without the help of ASID. Through training sessions, lobbying templates, financial support and links to a nationwide network of politically knowledgeable designers who helped establish legislation in their respective states, ASID buoyed a committed group of New Jersey volunteers during a 10-year voyage to certification.50
Multiyear