The essentials in 30 seconds
- Curricula cover the design family very well (drawing, 3D, rendering, materials), but the management family very little, even though it fills half of daily studio life.
- Real practice comes down to 6 professional acts: estimating, tendering, comparing, getting client sign-off, following the site, invoicing fees.
- Each act has its tooling, and it is taught better on a semester-long project than in a theoretical course.
- Teaching software must be online, with no installation, multi-seat, and assessable on real deliverables.
- A one-semester professional-tools module is enough to make a cohort operational from the first position, a measurable employability argument for the school.
What schools already teach very well
Let us start with what works: training in design. Technical drawing, 3D modelling, rendering, design history, materials culture, project methodology: across that whole spectrum, French interior architecture schools produce solid profiles, and studios see it with every hire. A recent graduate can read a space, build a concept, represent it and defend it in front of a jury. That foundation is not the subject of this article.
The subject is the other half of the profession, the half that does not show in a portfolio. Because once the concept is approved, the interior designer spends most of their time on management acts: estimating the project, tendering to companies, comparing their bids, getting decisions approved by the client, documenting the site, invoicing fees. It is that half which decides the profitability of a studio, the legal solidity of a project, and how comfortable a graduate feels in their first three years.
The gap observed in studios
The scenario repeats itself in most practices that take on a junior. Week 1: they are given plans and presentation boards. Excellent. Week 3: they are asked for a first works estimate broken down by trade packages, and everything becomes improvisation: the quantities come out of nowhere, the thankless items (strip-out, rubble removal, protection) are missing, the prices are copied from a forum. Week 6: a first tender template to prepare. The junior discovers the word DPGF and the two-companies-minimum rule at the same time.
It is the fault of neither the graduate nor any single school: it is a collective blind spot. The curriculum naturally devotes its hours to what shows in a jury (the project, the rendering), and the management acts end up compressed into a few theoretical hours of "professional practice", often at the end of the programme, with no hands-on scenario. The result: studios train on the job, at their own expense, what the school could have taught on deliverables. Graduates, meanwhile, experience their first months as a demotion, when all they lack is a method.
The 6 professional acts, and the matching tools
Here is the grid we propose to programme directors. It does not describe a piece of software: it describes the profession, act by act, with the deliverable the student must be able to produce and the family of tool that structures it.
| Professional act | Deliverable the student must produce | Family of tool |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Produce an estimate | A budget by trade packages and line items, with defensible quantities and ranges | Estimating tool backed by a price library |
| 2. Tender to companies | A DPGF with blank prices, sent identical to at least two companies | Structured tender template |
| 3. Compare the bids | A line-by-line comparison and a reasoned recommendation | Bid analysis support |
| 4. Get client sign-off | A moodboard that secures a decision, a tracked approval | Presentation and approval tool |
| 5. Follow the site | A structured progress report, a per-package schedule kept up to date | Site follow-up tool |
| 6. Invoice fees | A fee proposal set out and defended | Calculation method and proposal template |
Each of these acts has its method, documented in our library of professional articles: project management in 11 steps for the overall view, the moodboard as an approval tool for act 4, the site progress report for act 5, fees for act 6. A teacher can draw on these contents freely: they describe the practice, not a product.
How to build the module without overloading the curriculum
The good news: this is not about adding six courses. The format that works is a semester-long thread project, attached to an existing design project in the curriculum. The principle: the project the student designs in the studio also becomes the one they estimate, tender and follow.
- Month 1: estimate. From their own studio project, each student produces an estimate by trade packages: quantity take-off, complete line items, ranges. Graded deliverable: the estimate, and the ability to defend it line by line.
- Month 2: tender and compare. The template goes out with blank prices; the teacher (or companies partnered with the school) returns two deliberately diverging bids; the student levels them, compares them line by line and writes a recommendation. This is the most formative exercise in the module: it teaches the critical reading of a price.
- Month 3: get sign-off and follow the site. A client role-play on the moodboard and the selected bid, then a site simulation: three successive progress reports with imposed incidents (an item of additional works, a delay, a reservation). Deliverable: the complete project file, from the estimate to the last progress report.
That leaves the choice of the supporting tool. The criteria that matter for teaching use, in order: accessible online with no installation (computer rooms and heterogeneous personal laptops are the reality of schools); deployable multi-seat at the scale of a cohort, with an account per student; used by real working studios, because teaching a toy tool destroys the module's credibility; able to carry fictional projects with no real data; and producing assessable deliverables (estimate, template, comparison, progress reports) that the student can take into a job interview. The cost to the institution is negotiated as a deployment agreement, on the model of education programmes, and it is discussed publisher by publisher.
So, what about Nodal?
Nodal is the management software that working interior designers use to run exactly these acts: an estimate backed by a construction price library, tendering to companies on a DPGF (identical template, blank prices, line-by-line comparison), tracked client approval, follow-up by trade packages, moodboards via Nodal Studio. A student who runs this journey on a practice project learns the professional gesture, not a theory.
We are building a schools program with the first partner institutions: deployment under an institutional agreement from 30 seats, student accounts on practice projects, support for teachers on the thread-project module. The program is under construction; the terms are defined with each institution, on request. If you run an interior architecture or spatial design programme, let's talk: 30 minutes is enough to see whether the format makes sense for your curriculum.
Article published on August 26, 2026. It describes a reading of professional practice and a teaching format proposed to institutions; each school remains the judge of its own curriculum. The Nodal schools program is under construction: its terms are defined with each institution, with no commitment at this stage.