It is happening already. Point your phone at your reception area, take a picture and ask AI to imagine it in any way you can imagine, or even in ways you cannot. You will be astonished. In minutes. Then ask for a couple of variations and there you go again. For those of us who have spent years designing and building interiors, this is an extraordinary thing to watch.
To put it in perspective, only a few years ago you would have called a company like Business Interiors and perhaps two or three similar companies. We would have visited, discussed what you wanted and gone away to work on some ideas. A few weeks later, you might have had three first draft proposals. You may or may not have paid for them, but across those companies thousands of pounds of working time could have been spent coming up with the designs. You would start down the route of the design you liked best, Business Interiors would win, of course, and a few months later you would have a new reception along the lines of the concept presented all that time ago.
Now AI is producing a visual of the finished result that you may be happy with in minutes. That design might already appeal to you more than anything the three companies produced in weeks at considerable cost. Even if it does not, the reception of your dreams could be another prompt away. You effectively have an incredibly capable design partner living in your phone, available whenever you want to try something. It is difficult to overstate how much that changes the beginning of a project.
From the drawing board to the finished canteen
Take the staff canteen we designed and built for South West Communications in Exeter. Here is our original design visual, followed by a photograph of what we actually built. Different viewpoints, but you can recognise the long orange bench, the communal table, the lounge seating and the sculptural lights. Even the landscape on the wall evolved as the design developed. This was how we worked before AI: develop the design, show the client what we had in mind, agree the details and deliver it.
The same room. Three new ideas. Roughly two minutes.
We then gave AI the photograph of the completed canteen and asked for three different approaches, keeping the same room and viewpoint. These are the results. All three were generated in roughly two minutes. You might prefer our original, or you might prefer one of these. The extraordinary thing is how quickly we now have three completely different ideas worth discussing. Imagine doing that while we are sitting together at the first meeting.
Although this is massively disruptive, at Business Interiors we find it incredibly inspiring. In many respects, clients still fall into the same two categories they always did. There is the client who has a clear idea of what they want, which informs the brief, and the client who knows they have an issue but has no idea how to solve it. The difference is how quickly either can now move forward. The first can show us images and a brief they have already developed with AI, taking a mountain of work off our hands and allowing us to concentrate on making it happen. With the second, we can get our phone out and start exploring concepts together.
The power of showing somebody an idea there and then, in the first meeting, is enormous. They can react to it, explain what they like and change what they do not. Equally, if the client has already done much of that themselves, the same thing happens in reverse. They inform us. Either way, the project can clear a labour intensive hurdle in minutes rather than weeks. Sometimes projects never cleared that hurdle at all. Now the conversation can be happening deep into the next phase from the outset.
Five things this means
1. Clients are far better informed
Clients can explore ideas, investigate materials and develop their thinking before they call us. They can show us what they mean rather than struggle to describe it, and they can question what we propose with a much clearer idea of the alternatives. Anyone who has discussed an office brief knows that “modern” or “welcoming” can mean completely different things to different people. An image gets us into a meaningful conversation much more quickly. We spend less time trying to understand what somebody has in mind and more time working out how to achieve it. We have always liked clients with ideas, and if they arrive with a better idea than ours, so much the better.
2. Designs evolve on steroids
Multiple iterations can be tried quickly, which means ideas that might previously have been abandoned for lack of time or budget can be properly explored. Try a different layout, change the materials, do something completely unexpected and see what happens. You no longer have to wait until the next meeting to discover whether an alternative was worth pursuing. It is hard not to believe that our built environment will improve as a result. More people will have access to good design ideas, more options will get considered and there will be fewer excuses for settling for something uninspiring.
Perhaps the days when walking into an office that “someone else built” fills us with dismay will become less frequent. We have certainly seen spaces where you wonder how anyone thought that was the best answer. Some of the mistakes made by less experienced firms should start to dry up as better alternatives become easier to produce and compare. Experienced designers can push their ideas further too. The design of the world around us could become incredible, and that is good for everyone. We spend too much of our lives in buildings to be indifferent about whether they are enjoyable places to be.
3. The value a company like Business Interiors brings will shift
Before AI, we differentiated ourselves by producing the best designs. People came to us because they trusted us to imagine the best space for them. If that part of the design process is becoming a commodity, then interpreting those designs becomes increasingly important. Can it be built? What will it cost? How do we achieve what the client loves about it within the money they have available? Cost analysis, designing to a price, technical knowledge and project management all become a larger part of the value we bring. There is a considerable difference between making something look expensive and making it expensive, and knowing how to achieve the former without the latter takes experience.
Essentially, the difficult part of the process starts to shift away from producing concepts at a desk and towards working out how to deliver them. The funny thing is that the tension between project management and design will remain. On site, people used to pull their hair out at indulgent designers who wanted floating staircases and all sorts of things that looked wonderful on paper. Now humans will be scratching their heads at AI. At least the drawings should be quicker to develop and revise, although somebody will still need to make sure the staircase stays up. We suspect the conversations on site will remain fairly familiar.
4. Changes should be minimised and costs reduced
If the design is properly explored and agreed earlier, there should be less need to adapt it on the fly. Clients sometimes change their minds during construction because it is the first time they have really understood what they are getting. That is an expensive moment to discover you do not like something. Being able to try alternatives quickly, see the result and incorporate changes before work starts gives everyone a better chance of getting it right first time.
That early agreement needs to carry through into the details, specifications and prices, but the opportunity is obvious. Fewer changes during the build should mean less work being undone, fewer materials being reordered and less time spent resolving decisions that could have been made weeks earlier. Buildings will still throw up surprises. We do not need to add uncertainty about the design to the list. Changing a reception desk on a screen is a great deal easier than changing it after the joiner has made it.
5. Someone still has to build it to a price
One thing AI cannot do on its own is commit to building that reception for an agreed price and then turn up to deliver it. That comes down to humans on the ground. Somebody has to get reliable prices, order the materials, organise the trades, manage the programme and take responsibility for the finished job. Eventually those people will be assisted by robot workers too, but for now there is still a considerable amount of very human work between the picture on the phone and the reception you walk into.
The human value runs through the whole process. It starts with steering AI towards a better result, asking the right questions and recognising which ideas are worth developing. It continues through the practical decisions that make the design affordable and buildable. Then it is over to a firm that can deliver on time and on budget. The fact that the client can now produce a beautiful concept themselves makes that ability to deliver more important, because their expectations will be high from the outset.
Imagine what we could build
We find all of this enormously exciting. We have spent our working lives believing that good design makes a difference to how people feel, how businesses present themselves and how much they enjoy the places where they spend their time. Now far more people can explore those possibilities themselves, and those of us working in the industry have extraordinary tools to help them. Of course it will change how we work and what clients pay us for. It would be strange if something this powerful did not.
But think about what the result could be. Better spaces, more imagination, clients who can explain what they want and designers who can explore ideas they would previously never have had time to develop. We could see a remarkable improvement in the buildings and interiors around us, and we should be enthusiastic about that. Someone has got to build this new built environment, and that is an opportunity for companies like Business Interiors too. We are looking forward to being part of it.
