“There is no such thing as a simple room,” wrote the architect and theorist Mark Wigley in the ambitious 2011 anthology Toward a New Interior. It’s a statement and a publication that mark the increased critical interest which, in the past few years, has been directed at interior spaces and their attendant design strategies. A graduate course taking part in this re-evaluation of the interior is the Piet Zwart Institute’s two-year Master Interior Architecture: Research + Design (MIARD) programme in Rotterdam. On the occasion of the re-titling of the course – the “R” and “D” previously stood for “Retail Design” – Disegno speaks to MIARD’s course director, Alex Suárez, about the new remit, ethos and ambition of the course.