AI HAS REVOLUTIONISED OUR WORK FLOW

Dan Weissman, senior associate at Lam Partners and director of Lam Labs, predicts that AI will increasingly be able to take on mundane and bureaucratic tasks, freeing up designers to focus on creativity.

Using AI to generate visual images can serve a particular purpose. As a tool for idea generation or iteration, it has some interesting possibilities. For instance, I’ll render an image of a design concept in 3ds Max and then upload it to DALL-E and [the AI] will offer alternative design options. But to me, this isn’t that interesting in the long run.

What interests me more is using AI-based tools embedded in other things. For instance, in the past a render used to take a couple of minutes to render out; it’s very pixellated; it’s pretty grainy. Now we’ve started using an AI DeNoise script with our render engine, iRay. The AI samples all the pixels and guesses at how it’s going to look and within a second or two, the image looks relatively realistic.

The result is that iRay is now exceedingly fast and we’re basically working in real time in digital space. We’re literally moving around a model in real time.

We’re able to work on the thing itself, rather than a proxy. And it’s not just radiosity, it’s all the lighting phenomena.

We’ve been using AI embedded in this programme for four years to significant success, and it’s basically revolutionised the work flow at our office.

I don’t waste time trying to sell a client on an idea with diagrams – that’s silly – I just jump right in and model up some options for them in real time. I’ll pull up the programme, move around in real time, they’ll say ‘I don’t like that’ and we’ll move things around.

So AI isn’t necessary to me to generate scenes or concepts. What I want to use it for is to eliminate the most annoying parts of the design process.

There are three main processes [in lighting design]: visualisation, documentation and specification. I see AI being able to participate in various ways in these, but under the surface.

With documentation, AI can tag hundreds of different items on a drawing. I want an AI that will automatically sweep through and tag every single fixture with the appropriate tag, and keep that tag from overlapping the fixture, and make it readable at all scales.

For me, the promise of AI is taking out all the annoying stuff. I read a great quote online: ‘We don’t need to AI to do art, we need to do all the other shit so human beings can do art’. ■