Artificial Intelligence in Interior Design
Recently I had the pleasure of attending a presentation through The Interior Designers Hub on the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Interior Design. Delivered by Vanessa Edwards @practically.fabulous it would be fair to say that at the beginning of her presentation there was a group of very worried Interior Designers who all believed that we would soon be out of a job, by the end of it we were definitely less worried and actually quite intrigued and interested to have a go ourselves!
So, what is AI? AI is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by humans or by other animals.
AI is trained on images from human designers and artists which raises many questions about the morals of using a person’s creative ability to learn from to be able to do it eventually without them.
Vanessa creates AI Interiors using a programme called Midjourney. Basically, by entering a string of commands that tell the programme what you require it takes just a matter of seconds to produce the image you have requested. Naturally after the presentation I decided to have a go!
I entered the following string “lounge japandi style with south facing window pink blue green colourscheme with built in bookshelves and lots of modern artwork” and received the below image
AI created image of a japandi style lounge
What do you think? It’s pretty nice isn’t it? You couldn’t achieve this look currently as none of the products are real but I guess it won’t be long before the programmes will use items that you can buy or that can then be made from the image.
What is amazing is how quickly the programme returns a result – these literally took about 8 seconds to produce, significantly faster than any human could produce an image. I guess this is what makes people so nervous!
The interesting thing about the software is the more you use it the better the results you receive are as you learn how to ask for what you want. In fact, Vanessa says she has found that “[her] imagination is stretching as to how I consider designing interior spaces. The practice is expanding my creative range”
Below is a space that Vanessa has created using AI which are hard to find fault with; they are pretty beautiful spaces. Interesting to note that the colours are very similar to those in my images although our search terms were very different.
AI created kitchen
Whilst the concept of AI or metaverse might be difficult for some of us to get our head around, it is likely to be far easier for the generation of kids who are growing up playing games such as Roblox and Minecraft as they are native to the idea of virtual worlds.
Early proponent of AI is artist Andreś Reisinger believes “On a creative side, it will push us to escape and expand on what we’re used to believing are our vision, imaginations, our possibilities of creation”
But this idea of working without limits is also something that creates tension between designing for the metaverse and the physical world. Architecture is shaped by the challenges of building materials take that away and you have a whole new set of challenges e.g. curves are easy to draw but difficult to build.
The main issue currently is that AI in interior design feels like it is a product for a few specific people and certainly not mainstream, this in turn garners fear. So with anything new, the first steps are to understand and access it – so that is what I will continue to do!
Have you had any experience with AI? How do you feel about its use in society – let me know your thoughts on over on our social media accounts @beckyharrisondesigns.
Until next time,
Becky x