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DLR Group’s Osma Thompson explores how AI can be utilized as a software and support the design course of.
Who Cares About AI?
To maintain the philosophically weighty subject of AI as mild as doable, think about DLR Group’s model promise to “elevate the human expertise by way of design.” A serious a part of that have is that we use instruments to facilitate and support our most simple capabilities. We have to keep alert, so we use instruments to make espresso; we have to bear in mind issues, so we use our smartphones to hop on Google and set reminders; or we have to talk our ideas to others, so we write them down on laptops.
The purpose is that it’s no exaggeration to say that human historical past is one lengthy historical past of software use, and we’ll be so significantly better after we start to see AI for what it’s – simply one other software.
AI and Design
With that out of the best way, we will ask what we take to be the extra attention-grabbing query about AI: How does AI change into a software, and truly support the design course of?
First, let’s be clear that each one design begins with an inspiration which is then ideated into a number of doable iterations. Designers typically flip to precedents to glean inspiration for initiatives. It’s right here that DLR Group’s inner custom-made generative AI is an extremely useful gizmo: it attracts parts from each our wide-ranging portfolio in addition to exterior inputs. This offers our in-house designers entry to what any designer might need with an open-source AI machine, however permits us the privateness vis a vis our personal portfolio to freely delve into and discover the probabilities of AI.
Many creatives fear that creativity can be forgotten, and designers will merely construct no matter uncooked materials is generated by AI as an output. When put that manner, it’d sound like affirmation of the artistic’s worst concern about AI – that it’s sapping creativity from the method, and letting the robotic do the work for us. And but if we’re sincere in regards to the design course of, particularly with the emergence of computational design that has come from Grasshopper and Rhino over the past twenty years, our designers know that you just don’t simply take essentially the most “optimum” design that the algorithm spits out – you weigh these outputs in opposition to others and picks essentially the most appropriate answer for the issue. Computational Design, and now AI, permits us to curate these options and design ideas loads sooner than if we have been to generate them manually.
On this sense, AI merely makes the design course of extra environment friendly, and probably extra numerous. In fact, the very velocity of the method, and the flexibility to be stunned by how sure design parts are integrated, could be extremely inspiring. We wouldn’t wish to downplay how helpful of a software AI could be. Nonetheless, we’d wish to mood that pleasure by saying that AI hasn’t basically modified design – it’s actually simply an evolution, the subsequent logical step, of what’s been taking place all alongside.
In abstract, we’re leveraging AI as a software to enhance and iterate our design ideas, not generate them for us.
Case Examine
A superb instance of how our agency has embraced AI is the output of an annual, day-long, company-wide charrette. This 12 months, totally different teams inside the agency have been requested to design a construction that will showcase the human expertise to extra-terrestrials.
Lots of our designers used AI text-to-image prompts to generate visuals that mirrored their ideas. The workforce that I used to be part of, for instance, was in a position to dedicate half of our time to ideating our idea and hand sketching, whereas picture technology and curation have been dealt with by our keywording with a text-to-image AI machine.
To essentially really feel how AI impacts design, think about that when charrettes require a reasonably picture as a deliverable, the idea technology section is usually grossly outweighed by the picture execution section. On this case, our designers have been in a position to spend an excellent period of time on idea growth, and this resulted in some compelling and thrilling closing merchandise.
What we imagine these charette photographs characterize is how AI expands our design course of with out changing it. For as otherworldly as the pictures are – and their otherworldliness appears to be one thing of a metaphor for the way unhuman AI can typically really feel – that course of is nothing with out human creativity.
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