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So, this whole generative artificial intelligence (AI) thing is generating a lot of hoopla. Indeed, Goldman Sachs says 300 million jobs will be affected by it.
And like most people, I only care about one of those jobs: my own. I’m an architect, interior designer, and business owner. Here are three ways I believe AI to a gamechanger in my field- and one way the game remains the same.
Gamechanger #1: Architects are more vulnerable than most
Goldman Sachs analysed a whole range of jobs, to assess how much of a threat AI posed. The good news is that we’re better off than lawyers, but the bad news is that we’re worse off than most.
To be precise, they evaluated what they call “current work tasks that could be automated by AI.” For lawyers, it’s 44%; for architects. it’s 37%. (The average across all jobs is 25%.)
One possible solution: we could switch from designing buildings to getting our hands dirty and actually building the things. You see, just 1% of construction and maintenance jobs could be automated, according to Goldman Sachs.
Gamechanger #2: Floor plans, goodbye..?
To find out which bits of our jobs fall into that 37% category, we asked ChatGPT, the poster child of generative AI. “Artificial intelligence can significantly improve design efficiency by automating repetitive tasks such as creating floor plans, three-dimensional models, and rendering images,” it told us.
Take a software like maket.ai. For US$30 a month, it promises to generate multiple floor plans, and export them in a drawing exchange format (.dxf) format. They talk a good game about “revolutionizing architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) too- of course, some of it is just hype; I doubt it would have done as good a job as Frank Gehry on the Guggenheim in Bilbao, or Sean Killa’s Museum of the Future in Dubai. But there’s definitely something in it. Autodesk has an AI lab and is working with universities including Stanford and
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It’d take a brave designer to bet against these powerhouses.
AI is also very good at the boring but important stuff in fields such as safety and sustainability. Whether it’s a new build or a retrofit, we can install of bunch of (relatively) cheap sensors, and let AI do the rest. It generates fascinating insights on human issues such as air quality and desk utilization rates, to vital structural problems such as concrete cracks.
Gamechanger #3: Sales gets a boost
As a business owner, sales is a massive part of my job. But not in the way you’d think. Sure, I have to constantly focus on business development to generate the cash to pay the rent, taxes, and salaries.
But more importantly, even after we’ve won the contract, we’re constantly selling our ideas and our designs to existing clients. I always remember a great quote from the graphic designer Paula Scher on the Netflix documentary Abstract. She said that she spends 10% of her time designing, but 90% of her time convincing clients that the designs are good. That’s probably a slight exaggeration, but the point is well made.
AI can and does help here. Like most interior design and architecture firms, we have a big team that does nothing but create 3D visuals, either static or fly-throughs. They are time-consuming and expensive. But we need them at every stage of the design process. At the pitch, at pre-concept, at concept design, at detail design, for the client’s marketing campaign- the list is endless.
Open AI – the ChatGPT guys – have launched a 3D generator called Point-E. It’s still in beta mode, but the potential is there. There’s little doubt that AI will be hugely powerful in generating virtual reality content.
But despite all this, the game remains -fundamentally- the same…
I was born in 1981, the year John Walker and 12 programmers in San Francisco created AutoCAD. Computed aided design was touted at the time as the death of architecture. Turns out it wasn’t. Around the same time, calculators and spreadsheets were prompting doom and gloom headlines about the death of accountancy as a profession. Nope.
Even the guys at maket.ai recognize that you still need humans: “We empower architects, designers, builders, contractors, and developers.” The key word being empower, not replace.
Bottom line: as a business owner, if I could fire my 30-strong workforce tomorrow and replace them with an algorithm, my profit margin would go through the roof. But I cannot. Nor can I send a computer to a client pitch, or a site meeting with project managers and engineers over a tricky construction challenge. Generative AI will help us be more efficient, and maybe even be more creative, but it will not replace us.
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