AI and Interior Design

Mar 19

It’s early days for artificial intelligence. That means two things for interior designers:

There is an unbelievable amount of hype surrounding the emerging technology and how it may or may not disrupt our industry. The thing is…nobody knows how AI is going to help or hurt interior designers. Nobody. No need to get super-excited or super-freaked out about AI and our interior design businesses.
While nobody knows how AI will specifically impact interior design, we’re all pretty sure that it’s going to. Just as how personal computing / the internet / mobile phones have had massive impacts upon our biz, AI will do something similar. So…unless you’re an ostrich, we all need to pay attention to how AI is growing, changing and impacting business writ large…and be ready to move before it’s too late.

Takeaways: Don’t freak out but pay attention.

For this video, I sat down with interior design business coach Marc Müskens and discussed artificial intelligence and interior design. I hope it helps.

FYI: You can check out my entire podcast interview with Marc here.

Douglas Robb - Interior DesignHer: I've seen a few people who operate as design coaches who are interested in what AI is doing and now they're looking into using different AI image generating software and creating images for Instagram where that's completely made up.

And they're not saying this is something I did, but they're saying this is what I could do for you, which is blowing my mind because they didn't create anything other than the prompt into mid journey or whatever. Right?

Marc Müskens - Institute of Interior Impact: To come up with this image again. It can be a beautiful picture, beautiful scenery. They can show them what they are capable of.

If you teach me a good project, I'm like, oh, he or she is capable to do that. That's what I can see. But how? You are the director. They are their own client, so they don't show how their communication skills or how they translated ideas or feelings or emotions into that design. It's just like, hey, I'm the art director. I just create a beautiful picture. That's it. So it doesn't work for me. And then I want to know, why does it look like that? What's the intention behind it? What's the story behind it? Just why? I always want to know the why when I see a beautiful picture. I want to know why.

A lot of architects are creating images for other architects, and I do hate that because people need to live in it. They have other goals, other visions, maybe for their home. And I have so much people talking about experiences with interrogatory designers that just say, hey, you need to do this, otherwise I'm leaving. This is not good. The design is not good. If you're moving that door to that place or that area or no, we need to do it like that. This is beautiful. I get really angry when I hear that.

But I think it's fantastic to be the next new interior designer for them with a fresh new perspective on how interior design could be and the impact. Yeah, which blows my mind that people are worried that they're going to lose their job to some sentient AI image generator when it is that back and forth between the client and the designer and the why.

You need to be damn good with creating your own concepts and translate stories of people, demands of people, wishes, dreams from people, and that created to a concept. And then you need to be capable to communicate it with those kind of platforms or AI. But it's not the first phase you're doing, it's a kind of concept phase. And then you definitely need other skills to be a good designer.