Recently, a question came up from one of my students enrolled in my online course “BASE”:
“Olga, what is the future of sketch artists and interior designers as AI rapidly advances?"
Since this question concerns many people, I'll share my point of view here.
You are very welcome to share your ideas and insights on AI in the comments below. What are your thoughts? Please share them below. I’m really excited to read your comments.
Alright… Typically, professional interior designers study design for 4-6 years (in my case it was 6 years, year 6 was entirely dedicated to the diploma project).
Historically, the profession of an interior designer requires:
Stage 1. Copying
Almost all art education starts with copying the works of masters: we learn by attempting to replicate what is already known. This is our nature. The initial stage is learning the history of interior design and architecture, and providing “recipes” for popular canonical styles, like classicism, modernism, minimalism, etc., allowing us to assemble them piece by piece.
Stage 2. Blending
After mastering the history and understanding the basics, future interior designers can blend the knowledge they have acquired and mix it with other known elements to create new, more complex, and contrasting solutions that maintain a coherent and harmonious appearance. This is for instant, how some of the styles in interior design have emerged: fusion, boho, and contemporary classic, to name a few. You can break the rules when you know them, right? In other words, the educational system significantly expands on the range of interior designs that can be created.
Stage 3. Creativity
After mastering both canonical styles and the ability to break the rules of their formation, resulting in more intriguing visual outcomes, can we explore creativity. This means completely freeing up from the restrictive rules of specific styles and creating without being bound by existing conventions, while still adhering to the fundamental principles of design. This approach pushes the boundaries in every way.
Alongside with all that, there is a 1-1 work with clients, work with real three-dimensional spaces, sketching, considering dimensions, proportions, technical nuances, ergonomics, etc. By the way, clients in the majority of cases do not know exactly what they want. They see a picture on Pinterest — they want that feeling, ambiance, and emotion, they can imagine how they live in that interior. But they don’t know “How To”, this is our job as an interior designer.
In terms of visual work, AI learns from what is already known and created before 2021, specifically from publicly available images. However, it cannot distinguish between a good and a bad interior design or identify mistakes. You should give it very precise commands and prompts to receive proper feedback.
Interior design involves too many variables that exist in different planes. For AI to progress further, extensive training would be required. Moreover, the person responsible for training it would need to possess impeccable knowledge and understanding of these concepts. Therefore, achieving even the first stage is certainly not something that can be accomplished in just a few years.
However, even if we imagine a scenario where AI perfectly masters the first stage, not to mention the extensive work needed to go beyond standardised solutions, it would not pose a threat to skilled designers.
The initial stage where AI enters the life of an interior designer is as a tool that can handle certain routine technical tasks to enhance efficiency. In my opinion, AI speeders things up, it saves time, it gives you more options and you can accomplish more in less time.
Even if we hypothetically consider the perspective of complete substitution, we can draw parallels with the fact that all work was initially done manually. However, the mechanization of labor and the subsequent industrial revolution with the transition to assembly line production led to the term 'handmade' being used as an advantage even after two centuries.
Therefore, it is unwise to rely on AI 100%.
However, my online course “BASE” can help you gain a deeper understanding of interior sketching and perspective drawing.
“BASE": a Course Which Teaches All the Basic Techniques You Need to Implement Sketching in Your Interior Design Practice.
(Perfect if you are a novice in drawing interiors, interior designer, id/architecture student)
