Bellevue College instructor Mark Mappala has been named the most innovative interior design educator in the nation.

Mappala, of Seattle, is the national first-place winner of the 2010 Innovative Interior Design Education Award given by The Council for Interior Design Accreditation (CIDA).

Mappala was honored at the Interior Design Educators Conference (IDEC) national convention in Denver on March 19. He received $3,000 in recognition of this honor. The award recognizes and celebrates innovative teaching and program-related practices that advance the cause of excellence in interior design education.

Mappala’s entry, “pop-up” studio, explored retail design representing students’ retail projects in New York and Tokyo and conceptual speculation problems in tandem with the design of an actual pop-up installation in Seattle. Fourteen students created projects that comprised the “pop-up” studio.

“The projects were not a typical “retail store,” but a rigorous, intense, and critical exploration and artistic commentary of the brand essence and the implication on a foreign site,” Mappala said.

“In addition to the usual design challenges, such as dealing with the existing site conditions, one of the primary investigations was to analyze the retailer’s brand, intensive background research by the students on the cultural factors associated with the brand’s past and potential future, along with proposing a provoking design vision became a major design challenge,” said Mappala, “In a parallel reality, many retailers face the same problem. A pop-up building typology allows for creativity, freedom, and innovation.”

Mappala and his design students provided the first show for the COMING SOON gallery in Seattle, creating their “pop-up installation” inside the space at the official opening last March. “The show attracted many people from the design and fashion industry,” said Mappala.