Artificial Intelligence Meets Design

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what our increasing reliance on artificial intelligence means for the future of architecture and design.  

Like many people, I’ve experimented with some of the newer tools, but our company hasn’t leveraged the technology for design. 

Recently, I started seeing some of the larger commercial firms use it for test fitting—the main building block of how you start a project, especially for corporate environments, retail, or restaurants. 

The test fit is how you begin to place the parts and pieces together. For example, a project might stipulate 30 offices and 10 conference rooms for at least five people, and knowing that, a firm might create four separate iterations of the space, each with a different look and feel based on the layout. 

With AI, users feed the space requirements into the tool and it responds with incredible speed.

My concern about outsourcing these tasks to AI is that young designers will no longer learn needed foundational abilities.

I’ve heard that the program initially makes a lot of mistakes, but the instant you tell it that workstations can’t be in the bathroom, that error will never happen again. The more you use the model, the better the output. That’s not always the case with employees. 

Areas of Concern

Our firm hasn’t used AI in architecture for a few reasons. 

First, test fitting is a fundamental skill. Not only does it help young designers understand how to lay out a space, it’s also a way for them to get quick feedback from someone more senior. 

Next, being able to look at a plan and understand how it translates in three dimensions is really important. That spatial perception comes from repetition and practice. It’s like a musician playing scales. Say you’re test fitting a large office, how do you avoid the feel of a sea of workstations? Which walls should be low vs high? 

 Outsourcing those tasks to AI could mean that young designers will no longer get the needed foundational abilities to achieve true excellence in the field. At our firm, we might have a team member right out of school complete something three times because they are still learning. When AI becomes proficient enough to take over some design functions completely, what will that mean for those younger professionals? 

 Once the tasks that enable designers to hone their skills are taken off the plate, the ability for humans to complete those tasks will eventually be lost. I don’t know where that leaves us.

The ‘Intangible Something’

In thinking about AI, another more broad-based question comes to mind. There are still clients out there who understand that a truly new idea is not going to come from AI. Rather than innovate, the technology slices and dices everything that’s been done before. I question whether it can understand a brand or create spaces that reflect a company’s values. On the residential side, can AI glean the way a specific family lives and how to support that with design? 

There’s a different feel when you enter a space that has been really thoughtfully and originally designed. I don’t think AI can replicate that. It’s an intangible something. 

My concern is that without humans learning the more fundamental skills, our ability to create those truly special spaces will be more and more rare over time.