The events of 9/11 have been blamed for many things, but it seems they must also take responsibility for our unhealthy obsession with doing up our houses. As the theory goes, fortress thinking has led to the craze for painting, decorating and re-upholstering our interior space.

In other words, the more scary the War on Terror, and the more disempowered we feel, the more we spend on tat and the cosmetic renewal of our homes. Our little nests have never been more important to us.

In a way it's a bit like comfort eating, only you don't get fat: you just spend your spare time arguing over which is the most fashionable type of paint to buy (I'm told it's the Paint Library; Farrow & Ball are just so yesterday. Do keep up).

Hence the reason that entire industries are now dedicated to what colour we should choose for the hall next spring, or in the manufacture of goods of no discernible worth, other than casual gimmickry. Heated mirrors for one's bathroom; wi-fi detectors; God knows what: I find myself in shops now peering like a village idiot at gadgets for the home which not only baffle me as to their purpose, but induce a profound feeling of having landed on the wrong planet.

The television industry compounds the grief with the phenomenon of home and garden makeover shows, which encourage us to change our colour schemes, renew our cushions, refashion our lawns or even design our own novel homes as often as the seasons change.

Why, in the States, there is even an entire network, Home and Garden Television, with approximately 85 shows dedicated to design and decorating topics. To rail against such things is to deny capitalism itself. The market is insatiable. Since the Second World War housing stock in North America has increased from 34.9 million units to 105.5 million, the largest amount of private housing space per person in the history of civilisation, with the size of the average home doubling. That represents an awful lot of paint, lampshades and curtains to be renewed just as often as the interior design industry can persuade you to renew them.

But there is an unfortunate victim of this domestic frenzy, and it is the interior design profession, always the puny sibling of architecture, which by its own admission faces an identity crisis. From a provocative appraisal of the industry, Thinking Inside the Box, written by some of the most prominent academics in world design and edited by staff from the Scottish schools of art, I learn that interior design has dumbed down to the point that many students enrol on higher education design courses expecting to learn how to be not Mies Van der Rohe, but Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen. Which is rather tragic, not least because when the poor saps discover they are expected to study an intellectual discipline rather than just pick nice colours, a large number become disillusioned and drop out.

But there is an endless supply of cannon fodder. In fact there is a free-for-all in interior education, fattened by the expansion of higher education. According to the book, ten years ago there were 31 degree-level courses in interiors. Now there are more than 100 courses listed on the Ucas website, each one of them pumping out nearly double the number of students that there used to be on courses. Carol Smillie, you might say, has a lot to answer for.

In England and Wales, there is now one interiors course for every 1.1 million citizens. In Australia and New Zealand the figure is one for 2.2 million; in France it is one for 4.3 million; in Germany - where they do not seem to be suffering from any national style-blight as a result - the figure is only one for every 5.2 million. Clearly, the number of interior design courses a country possesses is in adverse proportion to its quotient of common sense.

Despite its teeming masses of Linda Barker wannabees, the UK has no national regulatory professional body, nothing to stop what one academic suggests is the intellectual icing being spread a little thin on the cake. All we have are a plethora of cushions and too many people qualified to tell us how to “dress” our dining tables.

Should we care? Well, yes, we should. Anything being dumbed down to this extent should alarm us. The threat to the intellectual framework of good design should concern everyone. Not that we shouldn't have seen this coming, this mania for stuff, as the world grew more affluent. Early modernists such as Adolph Loos, in his book Ornament and Crime, argued that the more refined Man is, the less inclined he is to decorate. I couldn't agree more. Le Corbusier argued that what was being created was “sentimental hysteria” in homes with too small rooms and a conglomeration of useless, disparate objects. From which we can deduce that he'd been in the electrical department at John Lewis too.

Proper designers want to raise the intellectual temperature of the debate. It is a necessary exercise. When today's school leavers, applying for interiors courses, are asked why they want to do it, they almost all state that the purpose of the discipline is to make people feel good. Funny, that. Wasn't that the climax of the Changing Rooms shows when the participants walked back into their living rooms, and whooped with joy at the jungle green walls and tiger skin throws? Aren't TV makeover shows all about arranging stuff to make people happy?

Thus interior design has been reduced to emotional therapy, not the complex study of purpose and scale.

So where do the elite designers go, now their ball has been stolen by popular culture? Will they retreat in a huff? Can they rebrand as interior architects and charge bigger fees? Ironically, we have never needed them more. For all we spend, in this homogenised, globalised, neurotic world, our homes have never been less individual or more in need of proper design.

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