Designed with, without or by AI?

The common perception is that the job of the Interior Designer will eventually be taken over by AI. There are numerous “take a picture and see your space complete transformed by AI” models that have been around since a couple of years now. In the last 4 months Gemini has gone “nano bananas” and leap frogged from a laggard in AI Image processing to a front runner.

Interior designers across the world, sitting on their wobbly thrones (think Lord Indra’s trembling seat), biting their nails, are left wondering what new trick this evolving banana will learn tomorrow that might eventually wobble the designer’s job into oblivion.

The AI threat to the Design world and to Interior Designers per se is not much different from that to other personnel like IT Programmers, Data Analysts and Bookkeepers all of whom are now commiserating why they did not learn Plumbing. The only difference is that Design, unlike an exact science, mixes a fair amount of art and perspective to science while creating the final concoction of a solution.

Ok, talking about perspective – let me first tell you where this all started and like always there was a client. He asked, “What is your style”? – basically he wanted to know if there was any specific theme or style in design that I naturally follow as a designer. In the daily strife one does not really think of things that way. The question took me back to one of my earlier writings on the “Missing Real Value of An Interior Designer” that built on thoughts presented in a talk between Saul Wurman (The Co-Founder of TED of the TED Talks fame) and Frank Gehry (the famous Architect who recently passed).

. The crux of it is when Gehry says about architects and I quote – “But my point is that … and I call it the “then what?” OK, you solved all the problems, you did all the stuff, you made nice, you loved your clients, you loved the city, you’re a good guy, you’re a good person … and then what? What do you bring to it? And I think that’s what I’ve always been interested in, is that — which is a personal kind of expression. And I think that’s the issue, you know; it’s the “then what”  — most clients aren’t hiring architects for that. They’re hiring them to get it done, get it on budget, be polite, and they’re missing out on the real value of an architect.”

In similar ways, design is not just about the look or the feel, it is not just about the furniture or the furnishing, nor the lighting or the colours,  it is about the Perspective – both that of the designer when s/he is planning the space and that of the space itself as a crucible of life, the life it drives and cultivates and what it represents. The designer’s job is hence to breathe life and persona into spaces – can AI do this in the future? …frankly I do not know.

Signing off

Nandita

“Cogito Ergo Sum”

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