Hearts and Minds

Definition

"Hearts and minds" names, in this wiki (following Larson), the strategic object of interior architecture's political work: public opinion itself, won or lost through the design of everyday interiors. Larson's chapter converts a Cold War strategic idiom into a disciplinary thesis — "It was interior architecture that was chosen as the way to the hearts and minds of Cold War participants" — and generalizes it across the discipline's history: "Interior architecture, before being recognized as a discrete scholarship, was responsible for the grunt work of winning the hearts and minds of the people in a battle of global politics that affected much of the life we live today. Given the power that interior architecture wields in everyday life, it has been instrumental in familiarizing people with political and economic strategies and in swaying public opinion." The concept names the interior's capacity to familiarize and sway — not to argue but to make a way of life habitual, ordinary, and therefore persuasive.

The Mechanism

The concept's mechanism, as Larson states it, is familiarity: interiors do their persuasive work not by argument but by inhabitation. In the Cold War, "home infrastructure was the linchpin of whether free-choice capitalism or a more state-controlled home design system resulted in a better quality of life – and a better nation." The American program made the middle-class interior — "a dishwasher, a combination freezer and refrigerator, a garbage disposal, and a countertop cooking range" — the material argument for its system; the Soviet counter-claim ("we have such things") contested the same object-field. The home interior thus operated "both as an abstract achievement of middle class and the tangible ownership of goods and appliances" — ideology at the scale of the appliance (see ideology, consumerism).

The Discipline-Level Claim

The concept's sharpest edge is the chapter's terminus, which converts the historical thesis into a claim about the present: "In the present, interior architecture is still doing the grunt work of familiarizing and swaying opinion through interiorities. Important issues of building reuse, space conservation, and historic preservation are being addressed through a so-called emerging discipline that has been down this road before." On this reading the discipline's contemporary programmes — even its most ethically respectable ones — carry the same persuasive structure the Cold War campaigns pioneered: interiors that make a way of life familiar enough to be chosen. The claim sits squarely in the wiki's politicizing-the-interior cluster and supplies it with its historical proof: the interior was political doctrine before it was political theory.

Key Thinkers

Jodi Larson — the concept's author: the hearts-and-minds idiom transferred from Cold War strategy to interior-architectural theory; the "grunt work" thesis and its present-day continuation.
(In the chapter's notes, not yet paged — see log: Laura McEnaney (Civil Defense Begins at Home, 2000) — the "militarization meets everyday life" scholarship behind the home-front registers; Greg Castillo (Cold War on the Home Front, 2010) — "the soft power of midcentury design.")

Cold War — the theme page: the historical program of which hearts-and-minds was the strategy.
Soft Power — the mechanism's theoretical name (Castillo's "soft power of midcentury design" via the chapter's notes).
Propaganda — the exhibitionary apparatus that carried the campaign.
Kitchen Debate — the climax: "the way to the hearts and minds of Cold War participants" reaching the world stage.
Civil Defense — the parallel home-front program: the same hearts won through safety as through abundance.
Domestic Interior — the field of operations: "the best-used and most often deployed tool."
Interior Architecture — the discipline whose political career the concept names; the "tool of choice in fighting for philosophical dominance."
Politicizing the Interior — the theoretical register this concept proves retrospectively: Teston's "both spatial and political" interior as established Cold War statecraft.
Ideology — the substance: "Modern living was officially drafted as patriotism."
Consumerism — the medium: "consumerism and applied economics" as the waging instruments.
Historiography of the Interior — the disciplinary amnesia the concept indicts: the "so-called emerging discipline that has been down this road before."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

Hearts and minds and dishwashers (Larson 2018) — the founding source: the title-idiom ("It was interior architecture that was chosen as the way to the hearts and minds of Cold War participants"), the mechanism (familiarizing and swaying), and the disciplinary terminus ("still doing the grunt work").

Open Questions

If the interior's persuasive power is its familiarity, is that power designable at all — or only exploitable after the fact by states and markets that find it?
Larson's present-day claim equates the discipline's reuse/conservation campaigns with Cold War persuasion. Is "hearts and minds" a neutral description of any design advocacy, or does the concept require a state (or capital) doing the persuading — and which is the contemporary patron?
The concept names what interior architecture did "before being recognized as a discrete scholarship." Does the discipline's academic consolidation after 1990 mark the loss or the maturation of this power — can a discipline theorize the persuasion it previously only performed?
How does hearts-and-minds persuasion relate to Teston's rights-based political interior (politicizing-the-interior, right-to-design)? Both treat the interior as political terrain — one as an instrument of state strategy, the other as a ground of claims. Are they the same interior understood from the two sides of the design brief?