Physical and Functional Changes in the Interior Design of "Home" and the Effect of Functional Changes on People’s Interactions through the Analysis of 15 Selected Iranian Films from the 60s to 90s

The home is the first platform for the formation of one's interactions with others. People in different spaces of the home interact with each other in various ways including eating together, watching TV, talking, arguing and celebrating. The interior space of a house plays a role in the manner and quality of these interactions. During the last four decades, major changes have taken place in the physical components of Iranian home interior design. These changes are sometimes related to the functionality. The changes can be seen in designing elements and details such as openings, furniture, lighting objects, and other details. Physical changes in the house are generally associated with functional changes in the behavior and the use of the interior space in the home. Although these changes can be easily recognized in the physical realm, their impact on individuals’ behaviors and interactions is not easily recognizable. Cinema, is a statistically approximate representation of both the physical and functional aspects of time. Cinema and architecture show commonalities in their subfields, such as stage design and interior design.
The purpose of this study is to extract the physical and functional changes in the home using the analysis of film scenery in the last forty years, as well as the impact of functional changes on the way people interact with each other. The necessity of this research is due to the fact that in the internal resources of the country, less attention has been paid to the classification and categorization of changes in interior architecture in this period.
This is a qualitative research with an implementation perspective. The data analysis method is comparative. Fifteen examples of family movies from the genre of Iranian films were selected for the research, where considerable amount of movie was spent inside the home. By extracting images from the films sequences and analyzing their stage design, the interior physical and functional changes as well as the impact of these changes on the way people interacted was identified and classified.
Findings show that changes of functional components in the last forty years, includes changes in the house plan, such as the method of spatial separation, removing interior walls and boundaries separating spaces, which resulted in freedom of movement in the space and increase direct interactions inside the home. In this research, after analyzing the movie sequences throughout four decades of Iranian cinema, it can be seen that there have been major changes in the way of using physical components. As another example, high rise buildings and increasing popularity of living in apartments has reduced the interactions between the interior of the house with the exterior spaces such as courtyards and walkways. While the impact of changes in physical components such as light, color, spatial proportions cannot be directly evaluated on the way people interact, using them in the expression of narrative script plays a prominent role.