JULIET M. KAVISHE

Vice President
ICoD
Interior Architect
Design Educator

South Africa

Juliet is a practicing Professional Interior Architect and Design Educator. Over a career spanning 16 years and two continents (America and Africa), she has worked as an Interior Architect and Architectural Designer on projects focusing on residential homes and commercial and corporate workspaces globally. Juliet is an Executive Board Member of the PADI (Pan Afrikan Design Institute), which strives to create a Design community specifically for Design professionals and academics focusing on African Design and African-focused Design education.

Juliet was also a past Director of the IID (African Institute of the Interior Design Profession), where she focused on improving and promoting excellence and professionalism in the Interior Design profession through hosting and leading dialogues and lectures around improving the resources and working relationships of the registered IID members. Her education was further bolstered by a traineeship focusing on bridging the gap between spatial design and curatorship of artworks at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, where she worked closely with Architects and Curators to ensure the vision of both disciplines was met.

Juliet’s passion for education has afforded her the privilege to invigilate and moderate design exams from undergraduate to postgraduate level at various design institutions in South Africa for the past decade. She is an undergraduate lecturer in Design, Visual Communication, Tectonics, and Professional Practice. She is also the current postgraduate program co-lead in the Interior Design department, where she has formulated research topics, design ethos, and methodologies in addition to being a design lecturer and supervisor, guiding the honors students through their design projects as it relates to their thesis for the year.

Juliet has written and contributed to conference proceedings and book publications and has a solid publication record. Her passion for the promotion of the Design profession, particularly within a broader African context, has led to various opportunities to share her expertise in Interior Architecture, including a lecture in 2013 on sustainable design and traditional African building practices at the World Policy Institute in New York, USA, a lecture on a Reimagined African Writing System at the 2022 DECOREX Summit, and call-up as Juror for the Caesarstone Student Design competition in 2019, 2021 & 2022. She went on to compose the Caesarstone Student Design competition brief for 2020/21, dealing exclusively with the Adaptive Re-Use of sites and buildings.

In October 2022, Juliet was elected as one of the new Vice Presidents of the ICoD (The International Council of Design), whose mission is to increase the recognition of the value of design, elevate the global standards of all design disciplines, and improve the situation of individual designers everywhere.

Juliet’s personal design motto is that Architecture or Design is achieved once you consider the complexities and interrelationships of human beings and their surroundings. Her current research and practice areas of interest are design education, curatorship, and design foresight.