The Intelligent Designer: Navigating the Realities of AI Adoption

A This episode of Practice Disrupted is brought to you by the American Institute of Steel Construction, AISC. The center's staff architects provide a curated collection of structural steel resources to help architects save time and money, reduce risk. Learn more at aisc.org/architecture. Welcome to Practice Disrupted, the podcast on the business of architecture and how it's changing. I'm your host, Evelyn Lee. FAIA, NOMA, architect, angel investor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're running a firm, starting your career, or rethinking what practice looks like, this show gets into how architects actually change the way they work. Hello, disruptors.

A Welcome back to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. Every firm assumes its junior designers will be the ones leading the way on AI. Stacy Thawort says that's exactly backwards. The lowest adoption she sees among creative professionals isn't the senior people, it's the juniors. Firms hire someone straight out of school expecting them to show everyone else how it's done, and instead find some of the most resistant people in the room. She has a theory for why. And it isn't the one you'd expect. Stacy spent more than a decade at Steelcase, most of it in sales and marketing, and finished there as their global AI strategist.

A Before that, she was an interior designer with her own small residential firm. In 2023, she started teaching other designers what she was figuring out about AI, mostly as a favor to friends who kept asking. That became The Intelligent Designer. And it grew big enough that Stacy left corporate to run it full-time. We get into why she thinks the real barrier is time rather than fear, what leadership sentiment predicts about whether any of this works at her firm, and the honest version of the sustainability question, which she says is the single thing she gets asked the most. Let's get into it. Hi, Stacy. Welcome to Practice Disrupted.

A So great to have you here.

B Thank you. Hello, thanks so much for having me.

A I want to say Amanda Schneider brought us together earlier, and I'm glad she did. I have been following you on Instagram, quietly lurking in the background, so it's so great to have you on the podcast. Before we jump in directly to what you're doing now, I'd love to kind of understand your love of design and architecture and interiors and how you came into this space in the first place?

B Sure. Yeah, it's a great question. So before any of the AI work, I was an interior designer. It's what I studied in university. And I think like many other creatives that pursue that are drawn to the craft just because of creative problem solving. I've always just been really interested in that and thinking about how in particular place has a way of shaping our behavior. And so design can have this really significant impact on how we spend our days and in turn how we spend our lives. And so I've always been fascinated by that, the role that, that space plays in shaping our day-to-day.

B And that's what initially drew me to the field of interior design. And it has just been a fascinating and wild journey over the last couple of years as I pivoted into this new space.

A So you spent a lot of time in commercial interiors, right? before this. What did that work teach you? And are there any tools that you still use, or process, or frameworks, as you went from working for kind of more bigger corporate to working on your own?

B Yeah, that's right. So, I spent over a decade working at Steelcase in a couple of different capacities. For the bulk of my career there, I worked in a sales and marketing position where I got to interact with a lot of the country's biggest architecture and design firms working on large commercial interiors projects. And so I think from that, in conjunction with my experience, my firsthand experience as a residential designer, I owned a small residential firm at a point in time. I had this sort of front row seat to the day-to-day struggles that designers have both on the residential side and in the commercial side as well. And so, that has been really interesting as I've pivoted into the work that I do with AI now around the opportunities of where AI can help the most, because I've seen and experienced those problems and those opportunities firsthand.

A I wanna dig a little bit deeper into what you were doing also at Steelcase from the global AI strategy standpoint, only because, one, I don't think a lot of people realize such a role even exists at a company like Steelcase, but also, you know, what people do in that role and what that role kind of teaches you about your potential clients that you are targeting right now.

B Yeah, so it is definitely a newer position that I think that is gaining momentum as more organizations seek to roll out AI initiatives internally. And so, my role at Steelcase, it was a really interesting time to step into that because it was kind of a pivotal moment as Steelcase was beginning to think about not only how they're rolling out AI tools internally, but also about the AI tools that we needed, that Steelcase needed to serve their clients and their customers. So, how the Steelcase brand needs to evolve and the tools that they provide to dealers and design firms, how those need to evolve as well. So in that position, I had the opportunity to look at not only internally what we needed to have in place with things like groundwork laying of things like what does our policy need to be? How do we share that policy with employees? How do we build enthusiasm and excitement around AI tools? tools to inform adoption. And externally, having a really deep pulse and understanding of what our clients and what design firms were asking for in terms of new AI capabilities and support, and trying to translate those needs of clients and designers into initiatives that Steelcase is putting out in the form of new tools and new client experiences. So it was, it was a very fascinating role, and I'm so grateful for the opportunity that I had in that position because I learned a lot in the time that I was in that role.

A Stacie, you mentioned how leadership sentiment and understanding around AI is a leading predictor of organizational outcomes. Can you go a little bit deeper on that?

B Sure. Yep. So, one of the things that I noticed during my time in that position was that just the importance around leadership. So talking about at the executive level, leadership sentiment and understanding of how AI tools work, both their capabilities, the AI tool capabilities, as well as AI tool limitations. And I think from what I've lived firsthand and what I'm seeing with the firms that I work with, this is a huge predictor of the organizations that are having positive outcomes and success with AI tools. Because if a leadership community is either in the bucket of kind of denying AI exists, then, of course, that has repercussions for how the organization evolves. Also, if they, on the other side of the spectrum, think that AI is just going to be this magic wand that they can wave and it's going to take over and automate all of these tasks, that can be equally as damaging. For many leaders, just like they're thinking about how employees need to learn these new skills and be upskilled and reskilled.

B The same is true at the executive level. Many of them do not have the time or the bandwidth that's required to really get a handle on these tools, especially given how quickly they're evolving. So that's an area. Fortunately, I'd say at Steelcase, the executive team was very, very supportive, but that's not the case across all organizations. So if the leadership doesn't have that understanding, then it can have a negative impact on how AI is adopted internally at any organization.

A You, at the top of your episode, mentioned that you had a fine arts background. So where did AI and technology start playing into all of this?

B Yeah, so in addition to being passionate about design, I've always had kind of a natural inclination or interest in all things Productivity, working smarter, optimizing my schedule. I am a working mom. I have 2 little boys. So anything that I can do to eke out more minutes and time throughout the day is always something that has caught my attention. And that was the initial draw for me to AI. And experiencing it the first time, it really felt like productivity on steroids, for lack of a better analogy. of being able to see what these tools could support, what I could start handing off to them. And then as I started to go down this, my own learning path and adoption path of figuring out all that I could about how to start using these in my day-to-day work, I felt like, especially at the time, 'cause this goes back a couple of years ago, so much of the tutorials and the information that was available out there was not built or geared towards a creative audience.

B So being able to translate the information about the capabilities of these tools into a way that was meaningful for my work as a creative professional was something that I saw an opportunity for. And so also that paired with the fact that a lot of my peers and colleagues were starting to see how I was using it. And I have a lot of friends who are designers and were curious, well, how are you using it? Where are you using it? And that is what eventually led to me creating the course as a way to just kind of package up and share all the things that I was learning along the way to try and be helpful to other designers and creatives that were on a similar journey.

A Yeah, you mentioned, you know, obviously that AI wasn't necessarily packaged for creatives, but you have had a lot of different roles throughout your career, right? Bridging IT, you mentioned sales and marketing, also design. Of those 4, where has it been hardest to bring along AI, and what does that tell you about where the true resistance is, especially in an industry like the AEC industry?

B Yeah, I hate to say it because I am a designer and empathize a lot with what we do as designers, but that is truthfully where I saw some and where I see some of the biggest resistance across those 4 buckets of IT, sales, marketing, and design, I would say design is where I hear the fears probably expressed the loudest. It's not saying that sales and marketing and IT don't have concerns. They certainly do as well. But with designers, I think there's this real element of almost protection around the creative process because we really pride ourselves in that and the creativity that we bring to the table. Such a part of not only who we— what we do, but who we are. And so as AI tools started to gain popularity, I think it's natural, especially when we think back to some of the earliest iterations of AI tools that were starting to go mainstream. I'm talking about image generators like Midjourney and DALL-E, where you could type in a prompt and out comes this beautiful image that we were— know previously would've taken weeks, months to produce something at that level. And so because of that, I think there was, especially at the beginning, a bit of a disconnect of seeing output like that and misinterpreting the actual capabilities of those tools.

B Because sure, it can create a beautiful image, but that image is not all that useful if it is not paired with the technical expertise that's required of a designer or an architect to bring that project to life. So I find that most of that, the fear is is at its core just based on a lack of understanding of the true capabilities as well as the true weaknesses of these tools. And that's causing some of the resistance that we continue to see amongst creatives today.

A I want to pair what you're talking about along with this idea of responsible innovation too. One, I think that's a nice segue, so thank you for setting it up. How do you talk to people about not only responsible innovation while keeping the business moving forward, but also the sustainability side of things that I think a lot of people question around the electricity and the use of resources that data centers are requiring to run AI tools?

B Absolutely. It's a great question. I'm glad you raised it because interestingly, of all of the questions that I get asked about AI, that is by far the most common one that I receive, whether I'm giving, you know, a keynote or talking to a firm directly, or even just individual designers inside of my course. And I think that's a positive sign because it means that we are being very thoughtful about this as an industry, which is a good thing. And I like to always start these types of conversations by saying that there are facts about AI consumption that are real and cannot be denied. The environmental toll that data centers take is a true fact. But just like other things that we have had to navigate, you know, our industry is no stranger to navigating environmental concerns. The built environment, the AEC industry is one of the industries that has the most impact, both can be positive and negative on the environment.

B So, this is just a nature, has been a nature of our profession for a very long time. And just like we have to make daily choices about, are we going to drive somewhere or walk somewhere? Are we going to fly to the client meeting and the client site to take measurements, or are we going to do something virtually? There are trade-offs that we have to make all of the time with, in terms of where we're going to make the more environmentally, the best environmental choice or accept something that might have more of a negative impact. And there are ways to mitigate that. So with AI, what I encourage individuals to think about is it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Just like most things in life are not all or nothing, the same is true with AI. So the best thing is— best course of action is to really understand the true nature of these tools, the true capabilities, because that way, if you are going to start using them with a better understanding, you can use them more effectively and you can use them more responsibly. And you'll have a better awareness of where they actually fit, where they're going to help your process, and where, quite frankly, they're just either not that useful yet or not something that you feel like you need the support of an AI tool. So I think we need to— a much more engaging or interesting conversation I think for us to be having as an industry is not just this all-or-nothing approach.

B It's thinking about it from both sides of the spectrum, having a more balanced conversation about the real implications of AI and data data centers, but also how we can leverage these tools in many ways to support some of our environmental goals as an industry.

A Thank you for that. That is a question that I get asked often too. So, I'm always interested to hear how other people are framing the response. It's usually, it's not dissimilar from what you're saying, but I appreciate your perspective as well. I'd love to dig into the Intelligent Designer, which you launched in 2023, right as generative AI was taking off mainstream. What did you see made it a big enough opportunity to walk away from like a very tenured career at a large company?

B Yes. So the initial response was far bigger than I could have ever imagined it. It truly started out as just this little side passion project of a way of helping kind of other designers learn what I was learning along the way. And what I pretty quickly discovered was that there, I think because there was so much a combination of fear and enthusiasm around AI from the creative professionals and a hunger and desire to understand more about it, the opportunity just became much, much bigger than I originally thought it would be. The decision to leave corporate, I would say, long trailed the visibility into just how big of an opportunity it was. That was evident pretty quickly, but I really enjoyed the work that I was doing at a corporate and enterprise level. And of course, you know, the security and the comfort of being in the world of corporate is not an easy decision to leave when you've had a great and interesting and fulfilling career somewhere. But what ultimately led to my decision to leave was it became clear that number one, I couldn't continue doing both.

B I had to make a choice. And it became clear that this is a really unique moment in time, opportunity in time, where I could have a bigger impact by scaling The Intelligent Designer to be able to provide more education and reach more designers. So that's what ultimately led to my decision to leave, but it was not an easy one. And still looking back, I, to this day, I'm just blown away by the response to the course and the the willingness of our industry to want to try and lean in and adopt these tools by learning.

A Have you ever considered yourself an entrepreneur when you started this?

B Certainly not before, not before this. But now, you know, a few years in, I feel like especially once I went full-time, I've started to see myself more in that light. But it's not something that I initially set out to do. It's something that I kind of more or less fell into. And I try, I know that my story is just one, but I do try and paint this picture for the design industry as well. When we hear so much in the media about job loss from AI, and I'm not going to dismiss that there's not going to be disruption, not only in our industry, but across all industries. There will be job disruption, there will be task disruption. What we do today will look different than what we do down the road.

B However, I am living proof of there's many, many, many other examples beyond me inside of real large organizations where AI is actually creating more and new opportunities, net new opportunities that didn't exist before. AI strategy was not a job that I imagined when I was graduating with my interior design degree that I would move into. And so I try and show this as, you know, share the story as a moment of optimism for designers that feel nervous about this, that There are so many exciting opportunities because we are living in such a unique time where this technology is brand new and the ones that are willing to lean into it are going to have new doors open for them as a result.

A I want to talk with you about the path that you did end up choosing, because there's a lot of— I mean, there's AI consultants out there that are making plenty of money. There's people doing AI startups. Why did you choose to land where you did in the more educational space?

B Well, I think for one, I've always just been passionate about education. You know, way back before I decided to be an interior designer, I thought about becoming a teacher until I realized that the work of teachers is no joke, especially elementary school teachers. So that wasn't for me, but my desire and passion for education always kind of hung around. And I feel that education really is the missing piece in terms of how we as an industry will adopt or not adopt these tools. In terms of software, we are quickly, you know, moving into a world where anyone can create a piece of software. In the time that we're talking on this podcast, we could have our AI assistant be building us a custom productivity app or a piece of design software or whatever we could imagine. And so I think there's, there's going to be a lot to navigate there, a lot of AI startups. That are here today may or may not exist in a few months or for a few years.

B And then consulting, I love, I've always enjoyed getting to work with organizations on a deep level, but the problem with consulting is it doesn't scale in the same way that the way that I have my education platform set up can. There's only one of me, but through my course, I can be teaching hundreds, thousands of designers at once. With a consultancy, that's much harder to do at the same level of scale. So all of those things helped to inform my decision to lean into the education route and the education model.

A I hear you on the scale ability and also wanting to build a business that gives me back some of my time too as it grows. Definitely.

B Absolutely.

A So you have over 8,500 designers trained on your platform. You have a newsletter with 25,000 people on it, 200,000 people on Instagram. Who did you target initially and where are you targeting now? Or what surprised you kind of as your business began to grow and the people that you found coming to you and your courses?

B Yeah, I think Right from the start, I was really focused on individuals like myself. So I had owned a small residential design firm, and so I knew those struggles firsthand of what it meant to try and run a design business while also being ingrained in design work. And so I really started there by thinking about, huh, if I was still in that firm, what tools and what ways of using AI would've been really helpful to me if they had existed back then. So that's who I set out by thinking about as an audience first. Another reason for that too, because I got a lot of questions, especially because I had worked in the commercial world for so long of, well, why not focusing on commercial? So much of what you're putting out there is more focused on residential designers. And one of the big reasons for that is because residential designers for the most part have a lot of autonomy and decision-making power of If they wanna lean in and learn a new piece of technology or have a few people on their team that are working with them, if they want to shift and pivot what they're doing in the direction, the tools they're using, they can do that if, if they decide that that's what makes sense. In the world of commercial design firms, similar to large organizations, it is a much bigger ship to steer. It's much harder to get, even if the commercial designers have a willingness and a hunger and an interest in learning, there's often many layers above them who are deciding if they can use AI, what tools they can use, when they can use it, how they can use it.

B So for that reason, I focus more on residential designers. But what I found, and as the platform has continued to evolve, that a lot of the principles can be applied to adjacent fields. So once you understand the principles of which tools to use, why those tools, why those models, how to talk and interact with those models, how to set up context so the context can travel with you depending on which tool you're using. Once you have those principles in place, it becomes fairly easy to take the— what I teach primarily to residential designers and adapt it to adjacent fields like contract furniture dealerships, architects, landscape designers, real estate agents, stagers, developers, You name it. There's a much broader cohort now inside of the— inside of my community, much broader than what I initially expected when I first set out. It was focused mostly on the residential side of the industry.

A I want to talk about kind of all the— A quick thanks to our partner, the American Institute of Steel Construction, AISC Architecture Center. It takes a huge amount of time and energy to create an elegant structural system. But as an architect, where do you start? With the diagrams and terms architects need to express their design intent. Find resources and inspiration at aisc.org/architecture or contact the team at architects@aisc.org. Experience that having and working with so many designers is giving you in terms of a wide-angle lens of adoption. So you mentioned, for instance, Since that design, the design part is where adoption seems to be the hardest. Is it a skills problem? Is it a fear problem? Is it a permission problem? What's the biggest thing that we can be doing to move the needle on the design side?

B From what I am seeing, truly the biggest barrier is time or lack of time. So many designers have the interest, they understand the importance. This is not a few years ago where there was a question of, should we be using these things? Or not, most designers I speak with too now understand this is important. This is going to shape the future. We need to understand how to use this. But what they lack is the time that it takes to not only learn a new piece of software, and fortunately AI tools are a lot easier than some other platforms like CAD and Revit and SketchUp and things of that nature. We've highly technical tools we've had to use in the past. But it does require time to not only learn it, but also then there's this whole layer of context building.

B So, once you learn it, how does the AI tool get to learn about you and the work that you do? And then also for all of your legacy systems, all of the legacy processes that you have in place, where your data lives and what state your data is in, all of these things impact adoption. And without time set aside for learning and implementation, testing, experimenting, failing, that really stalls how far an individual or a firm can grow with these tools. And if we are starved for anything as an industry, it is time. You know, we barely have, have time to just get through our design work and projects given the tight the tight timeframes that, and client expectations. And then you throw AI in there, it feels like a homework assignment on top of an already overwhelmed schedule. And so I think the firms that are, are going about it in the most kind of thoughtful way are thinking about what pockets of space, how do you make those pockets of space and time for your team to be able to learn, try, share. Because without that, you're only going to see adoption go so far.

A I agree with you. It's one of the reasons why I started focusing on operations, even though I really am interested in what are new business models that we can create, because we don't even have the bandwidth to think about what else we could be doing strategically in our firms. Again, time. What is the single most common misconception that you get from designers? Regarding AI?

B Yeah, the biggest one, and I think this is directly because of just how much of the marketing material is out there on, on these types of tools, are designers come to me over and over again asking, you know, which tool can I, which AI image generator can I be using so that I don't have to use SketchUp or CAD anymore, or I don't have to use my 3D renderer and I can just tell AI the room I want it to render and it will do that for me. And the reality of it is that doesn't exist yet today. We're getting closer by, by the minute, by the day, with new really exciting integrations like Claude and SketchUp now have a direct connection, which is unbelievably exciting about what that could mean long-term for our industry. But today that doesn't exist yet. And unfortunately, there's just so much marketing material that's being positioned to design firms. Every time they open up their phone, they're being served from the algorithm an advertisement of like, This image generator will save you from ever having to do any manual design work again. And it's just not the case. Those tools can be so helpful for other parts of the visualization and conceptual design and enhancing renderings, but they are not yet a one-to-one replacement for technical drawing tools.

B So it's so important that designers still learn that technical drawing ability, especially younger designers that are coming into the profession. They learn how to use those technical tools because if they don't, they're going to be very disappointed to find out that AI maybe in a few years will get there, but it's not there today.

A So you don't believe that AI is going to kill the design profession?

B I do not. In fact, I tend to take the opposite perspective. And again, not just specific to our industry. I think that there I know that there will be disruption in the short term, but in the long term, I think that we're looking at a possibility where it actually leads to net new job creation for the design industry, especially if you think about the role of the designer and the architect and that what a human-oriented profession it really is, because a lot of what the data is suggesting that as certain tasks become more and more automated with AI, it becomes— it places more of a premium and a desire for human-to-human interaction. So I think because of that, we're going to see the demand for design and architectural services actually increase. And I also think just the number and types of roles that exist in the design industry, there's going to be new roles that don't exist today. But again, I never like to undermine the fact that there will— there is going to be some disruption in the short term, but long term, I'm very optimistic about what it means for our profession.

A So you mentioned that AI can't replace technical drawings right now. Where are you finding designers using AI in meaningful ways in their current workflows?

B Yeah, so even though it can't replace technical drawings yet, there is just incredible potential for what it can do for visualizations. So, being able to produce conceptual images, enhancing renderings, producing things that are photorealistic in a fraction of the time, all of those are very much in the wheelhouse and current capabilities of the image models, particularly now with things like Nano Banana and GPT Images 2, they've come such a long way in being more precise where I can say just remove this light fixture or just change the color of the cabinetry or whatever it might be. That's something they struggled with so much in earlier versions. So visualizations are a huge area where designers are leveraging it not only to save time, but just to improve the professionalism and the quality of the work that they're sharing with clients. But then on the other side, and what so much of what I focus on and what I teach to designers is, you know, renderings are great and so necessary and so important, but we know that it's just the tip of the iceberg of what we do in a day, in a week, in a month to complete projects. And so where some of the biggest time savings and advantages in the designers that are seeing real wins with these tools are things like the administrative side. So on things like proposals, Marketing efforts, sales efforts, procurement. I just launched a whole new, a dedicated course on AI for procurement because it's one of those tedious, time-consuming tasks that AI is ripe to be able to assist with.

B So I think it's exciting to see more and more designers start to realize that where if like the rendering tools are kind of the gateway or the entree into using AI, once they start to go further into seeing these tools, they start to see all of the other ways and parts of their process that could be supported by AI tools.

A Absolutely. I think there was an argument in there, though, that it gives, you know, these tools are becoming more accessible to the general public, too, when it even comes to rendering. So, what is the conversation, or how are you teaching the conversation to the architects around You know, my client already came to me with kind of what, what they want to design, and how do you guide that conversation in a meaningful way?

B Yes, I love this question. It's something I'm spending a lot of time talking to designers about lately because it's happening more and more where their clients are coming to them with, with starting ideas. My biggest overarching message is we don't want to discount our clients from doing this. To me, as a designer, I see this as a great thing. It is a tool that they can use to help express what is in their mind and give us a launching point where we can have a really informed conversation from day one about their wants, their needs, and their goals in a visual language. So I think it reduces some of that upfront barrier, those communication barriers that once existed. So if anything, I think we should be celebrating it. I think we should be encouraging it with one important caveat.

B It's extremely important. Again, this goes back to the education piece, that designers and architects understand the limitations of these tools so they can articulate that to their client. What the tool can do a great job at is creating something, you know, that looks nice, but it might not be feasible because they don't— these tools work in pixels. They don't work in vectors, which means You can tell it dimensions until you're blue in the face. You can say the room is 10 by 20. There's a window here that's 3 feet off of the wall. It doesn't understand dimensions. It's like speaking to an image generator in a foreign language, again, because it works in pixels.

B So for that reason, there is no way to be able to validate scale and dimensional accuracy, which obviously for any sort of construction project or even renovation project or interiors project, Very important. So you need to be able— the designers and architects need to be able to understand that and say, this is a great jumping off point. Thank you for bringing this to the table. We can unpack this together. Not dissimilar, like if they were bringing images they had found off of Pinterest, their ideas that they can use to inform the conversation. And then the designer and architect can say, you know, it's our job then to make sure that this is actually buildable, usable. functional, and we do that through, you know, our technical tools and technical expertise.

A I want to go back to something that you mentioned earlier, where I think there's going to be a continuous growing gap, because we've never been good at training our people, our younger people, people coming out of school in a very meaningful way, especially when I look at the educational development programs, companies like Slack and Salesforce, and how professional development is built into their careers. You mentioned that your younger designers still need to learn these technical tools. I think there's gonna be a huge gap in the expectations that we need people coming outta school to understand, to move from conceptual project to real project. How are you looking or thinking about what training looks like in the future for younger designers? Especially if you need them to kind of critique what is coming out from the AI input and making sure that it is truly correct if they didn't draw it or if they didn't even learn how to draw it in the first place.

B Right. Yeah, this is again something not unique to our industry. I think a lot of industries are grappling with this of how do you upskill or provide that early mentoring and training if some of those tasks that would've been given to a junior designer or a junior employee are now being handled or supported by an AI tool. I think one area in particular that I think that we need to have a lot more focus and attention on as an industry is the type of AI education they're receiving at the university level. Now, some universities and colleges are doing a better job than others in their programs of providing that, but largely what I have seen is the focus sometimes is limited on just, well, you can use it to produce some renderings for the end of your project to make your images look a little bit better. And so what you're seeing, and this surprises firm leaders when I share this with them, is that some of the lowest rates of AI adoption among creative professionals are with the junior designers. There are designers coming out of college or in college that are flat out refusing to use these tools. And so the employer hires, you know, a brand new designer right out of school.

B And what do they think? They think, oh, this is someone who's probably— they're Gen Z, they're gonna be tech savvy, they're gonna show us the way, or they're gonna be our AI guru that tells us how to do all these things. And then there's this disconnect happening where the junior designers or younger designers are saying, uh-uh, I'm not using these tools. I don't believe in it. This— they're gonna steal our jobs. I want no parts of it. And it's not about dismissing those concerns. To me, that signals they haven't had enough exposure to the capabilities and the limitations of these tools. Because time and time again, the designers that I do see, once they have that exposure, they have a much more informed point of view of, okay, this is actually genuinely helpful here, not so helpful here.

B And so I think what that looks like at a practical level, we need more education at the university level for how these tools can be used beyond just for renderings, for that to support other parts of the design process so that those designers have a more informed point of view. And then also for the leaders to be mindful of the tasks and how they're mentoring a new designer on their team and making sure if they are using AI tools, it's not at the risk of not training the junior designer or bringing them up to speed as part of the— part of the process. It needs to be a both/and in order for these designers in our industry to have new talent to come into these positions, leadership positions in the future.

A I appreciate that you say it's not just a problem with our industry. I think we like to think we're extra special in dealing with things that other industries aren't. So, thank you for bringing a broader perspective to that view as well. So I think you and I collectively believe that those that adopt AI will surpass those who don't. What do you think is the outcome for the practitioners who really kind of continue to push back on this impending wave of AI and technology?

B I think opting out is a little bit of a fallacy because it presumes that AI is going to be something like a chatbot that you can either choose to open up, you can choose to open ChatGPT or Claude, or you cannot, and you, that's you opting out. But that is not the reality. That's not the reality of the current state. It wasn't the reality even a few years ago, and it's certainly not going to be the reality of a few years down the track because AI is everywhere. It is in our email, it is in phones, it is in our GPS, it is in our cars, it is baked into the design tools and the design software that we're using. So by saying you're opting out of AI, really that means you're opting out of all technology. It would be saying, going as far to say, I'm opting out of the internet and mobile devices and computers in general. And I don't think many practitioners are willing to do that.

B And so I think it is just important to have that understanding when we think of AI, if we're thinking about it just as ChatGPT that I can choose to open or not, we are missing the trajectory of where all of this is headed. So I think when you hear, you know, people say things like, and I'm not particularly a fan of like, you don't use it, you're going to get left behind, or you won't be replaced by AI, but the designer who uses it will replace you, replace you. Because I think we've all heard that, you know, those, those sayings are a little bit tedious at this point. We've all heard them. A lot designers have internalized that. They get it, they understand. But for those that are taking this, you know, I wanna opt out completely, I think I would encourage them to just build their awareness and understanding of just how pervasive these tools are and understand what that statement would really entail, because it is unfortunately not just as simple as opting out of a ChatGPT subscription.

A Yes, I agree. I think you also made me think about how I need to be communicating better to my audience as well. You know, AI is being used by healthcare too and banks too. So it is, when you think about how pervasive it is and what opting out means, to truly opt out across every aspect, I don't know anyone who truly could in this day and age.

B That's right. Even the example I give a lot is, Think about Netflix. You know, for how many years you open up Netflix and you're watching a show and it suggests the next show to watch. That is a form of artificial intelligence that we have been familiar with for years now. And so it's in so many places. And once you see it, it's hard to unsee it, but it's naive to think that it's something that we can just opt out of. And by saying you're going to opt out, you're not really opting out. It's like the worst of both worlds because you haven't really opted out unless you've opted out of all technology and you're not gaining the Yeah.

A And now I'm going down a bit of a rabbit hole because I have a friend whose husband works for John Deere and specifically in mergers and acquisitions. And the agricultural business has actually been adopting AI when it comes to the care and tending of their produce, for instance. So, there is, even from a non-technological consumption of AI, you are still consuming it. consuming food that may have been grown using some type of AI data.

B Exactly. Exactly. So you might have to, yeah, pack your bags and find a different planet to truly opt out.

A Yes. So let's look at the most optimistic view. Designers are adopting the tools. We are really being curious about the limitations, but also the opportunities that AI has for us. in the future, what does it look like? I just wrote down 10 in our prep sheet doc, but I almost want to say like, what does it look like 5 years from now for a designer to sit down and start a project?

B Well, I think there's— when I think about starting a project, my mind initially goes to the luxury of being able to explore, experiment, test, ideate, that is a part of the design process that has gotten more and more narrow as expectations for deadlines have continued to be crunched. And so I think AI tools, AI image generators, being able to have a quicker speed from idea in your brain to being able to visualize something, you're just going to naturally lead to more exploration. And with more exploration often means means better outcomes. So that's, that's one part of just being able to visualize and conceptualize at a broader scale. I also get very excited about this idea of democratizing this knowledge that exists today. When I say knowledge, I'm talking about like, think about code, or think about what you have to study to become a LEED-certified designer, or what you need to know about designing for inclusivity or ADA compliance or sustainability, you name it. That information, for the most part, lives somewhere else in some sort of document that we have to go to and know what to find or memorize it or be able to locate it and then be able to incorporate it into our design. I think what we're going to start to see is that that type of knowledge is just going to be built into the tools that we're using.

B And so, as that baseline becomes available, if every designer, a designer that's sitting down as their first big project, has access to that tribal knowledge that maybe an architect or designer would've had taken years to know, and it's at their fingertips as they sit down to work on a new project, I think it is going to be an incredibly exciting time of what that means, of how we can push the boundaries of what's possible. For the built environment because that education and that information is so much more accessible. So because of that, I'm optimistic on a variety of fronts and also just outside putting technology aside, as I mentioned before, I think this is all going to lead to even more of an appreciation for those in-person connections because designers and architects, you know, so much of what we do are those relationships. For an interior designer, you know, a homeowner doesn't know, or an organization doesn't know which trade they should use that's going to do a great job at doing a beautiful job laying the tiles, or is going to be a wonderful showroom that's gonna help make sure that the furniture gets there on time. And so I think there's going to be more of an appreciation for those in-person connections that sure, an AI bot can just recommend something, but the AI bot doesn't have a relationship that has been cultivated for years with a mill worker that you know is going to show up at the last minute to help you because you have that rapport with them. And so I think that is really going to even elevate our craft further as the understanding and the appreciation of the human aspect of design increases. I think that is just going to elevate the profession. So I'm optimistic on a variety of Upfront on both the tactical, how we actually sit down to create projects and the tools we use, but then also just the perception and the value.

A Hi, disruptors. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Practice Disrupted. Want more of this between episodes? Start with Practice Reboot. Our weekly newsletter on the business of architecture at practiceofarchitecture.com/newsletter. And when you're ready to stop reading about change and start testing it in your own firm, get on the list for The Lab at practiceofarchitecture.com/lab. We'll see you next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.