Predictions For The Future of Interior Design & AI from a Tenured Professor & Certified Interior Designer
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As a long-time interior design educator, I have many thoughts on how AI will reshape our industry. My feelings are a mix of cautious trepidation and genuine optimism—specifically regarding the potential to eliminate the cumbersome "grunt work" of procurement, digital drafting, and rendering.
Interestingly, when I ask my students (generally ages 18 to 25) about their outlook on the impact of AI, they seem undaunted. Unlike those of us with decades invested in tried-and-true methods, these students, and people of their generation, are naturally agile. They are in a perpetual state of learning and absorbing. And they have never known a world without "whip-quick" technological shifts.
Certainly, they are concerned with the elimination of jobs and opportunities. That has always been the main focus of all college students: will I be able to get a good-paying job that fulfills me? Nothing new there. But they view AI as just another tool in their kit.
From "Dumb Lines" to Dynamic Models
I have taught Revit for fifteen years. Every semester, I begin by explaining that AutoCAD, while revolutionary in the 1980s, is essentially just a digital version of manual drafting. An AutoCAD drawing is a large collection of “dumb lines”—digital marks on a workplane that require manual manipulation. You need to modify the lines as you draw, just as you erase and re-draw with a pencil.
Along came Revit in the early 2000s, changing the game by making those lines "smart." Place a door in a wall, and the software automatically splits the wall lines. Programs like Revit, SketchUp, and Chief Architect possess the true power of parametric modeling: the ability to automatically project a two-dimensional plan into a three-dimensional rendering.
The Cost of Realism
As I write this, my students are agonizing over a deadline for a 10,000-square-foot warehouse conversion workspace. Some are working until the wee hours of the morning just to finalize their Revit models and produce photorealistic Enscape renderings. Despite the power of the software, it remains painstakingly time-consuming to input all the details and produce all the digital elements within a Revit model file. It takes loads and loads of human hours to produce those lifelike renderings of a space.
Yet, here is the marvel:
These students only began learning Revit a little over two months ago, and now they are producing drawings just like professional users.
Yes, it is a very complex software, but once you grasp the underlying logic of how things are accomplished, there is logic for how to get from point A to point B with everything.
Imagine how, in the not-too-distant future, an AI-driven drawing program will be able to do all that painstaking drawing work on its own. The user will provide the input (locations, dimensions, selections, materiality), and the drudgery of clicking and keyboarding for hours on end will be replaced with an automatic and spontaneous generation of the model drawing by AI.
It is hard to imagine this occurring without major errors in interpreting design intent, but then, who could have imagined that AI could do even half of what it is currently capable of?
The Visualization Gap
I do not believe that the power of AI to do digital drafting and rendering on its own will eliminate work in our industry. I think it will open even more opportunities for designers who like tech-heavy work. But the beauty is that designers who do not currently produce high-quality renderings, and even those who do, will be able to produce these more quickly and inexpensively for clients.
The general public has poor to mediocre visual imagery skills: a large percentage of people cannot imagine in their mind’s eye what an environment they cannot see because it does not exist yet, might look like. Designers tend to be very good at this, which is why they can design in the first place: they can “see” what a space will look like with imagined changes. So, the ability to show clients a photorealistic rendering is a massive advantage for interior designers. Clients feel much more comfortable saying yes to concepts, and there are fewer surprises as construction progresses.
Mimicry vs. Innovation
So the big question in our industry is: if AI can produce photorealistic renderings of a designer’s vision, can it not also come up with its own equal-or-better design vision??? Can it be the interior designer as well as the illustrator?
I, along with many experts in the tech space, continue to believe that true human visionary creativity is unmatched and unreproducible. Yes, AI can do many remarkable things, but so can we. AI can mimic, but it cannot innovate. It has resourcefulness, but not originality. AI can write a play, but not a Shakespearean tragedy. It can compose music, but not a Beethoven sonata.
And make no mistake, interior designers: your creations are truly extensions of the human experience.
While AI can create drawings and automate procurement, it cannot feel the "soul" of a space or understand the emotional nuance of a client's history. It can arrange furniture, but it cannot curate a home. Our value lies in our ability to translate human emotion into physical space. So, I believe that the future looks very bright for the interior design industry. As the “drudgery” of much of our work will become increasingly automated, we reclaim the time necessary to craft environments that don't just look beautiful but resonate with the lived experience of the people who use them.
