How Architects Are Using AI & The Impact On Manufacturers | Ep. 233

the best way to learn about AI is just to play with these tools welcome to the smarter smarter materials Market podcast perform your competition [Music] welcome to smartability materials marketing I am Zach Williams alongside Beth popney glove and we have a great show lined up for you today we're talking about AI architecture what it means for manufacturers Beth you want to introduce Our Guest I'm really excited to welcome our guest because he's currently one of my favorite follows on LinkedIn we're so excited to have Paul keskies in the studio with us today he is the editor-in-chief at archetizer and is blowing up LinkedIn with how Architects are leveraging AI so we are really excited to dive in with him Paul thanks so much for your time and welcome to the show thank you so much for having me it's great to be here and I'm glad you're enjoying the content it's kind of a crazy wild ride for me on LinkedIn right now too before we get started why don't you take a couple minutes and just introduce yourself architizer you can even introduce AI to our listeners so I am an ox act as you can probably tell from my accent originally I'm from Mainland and I graduated from Edinburgh University and then University College London and I became registered Architects back in 2011. my story to get here to New York as an editor is kind of long the canned version I worked as an architect for a couple of years but during that time I became a little discontented with practice because I was just doing big residential developments a very similar kind of suburban developments over and over and over again and it wasn't super creative and I felt like I needed a creative Outlet so I started a Blog it was called The Angry architect I don't know if anyone's familiar with that but I used to just write on Facebook rant about architecture and about projects which I liked or didn't like in a sort of dry wooded way it was good fun it wasn't too angry actually but from there I got a contact from archetizer reach out and they were they said you know would you like to write for us we're interested in having an architect give their opinions from the inside of the industry and I didn't think that it could be real because it seemed too good of an opportunity but a long story short I became I'm a kind of a columnist for architiser for a number of years and then during that time I realized I like to write and tell stories about architecture more than I liked actually practicing architecture in a way so I asked them if it was possible to come and work in New York with them after many attempts at getting visas and many many years of difficult trials and tribulations around that I finally settled in New York and I've been here actually eight years now so 2015 to now and it's great because I love to tell stories I love to write but I still love architecture so I get to have the best of both worlds in that sense archetizer for anybody that isn't familiar with it we have the world's largest online community of Architects by number of projects we have well over a hundred thousand projects on the site essentially a huge database a huge library of incredible modern architecture but we also have a Blog element to it where we tell stories about Trends within the industry and also culture within the architecture profession and that kind of overlaps with technological innovation so we write a lot about the latest rendering software and the best laptops for Architects and things like this and this kind of content has proven to be really popular so when AI blew up in this past year in this ridiculously Fast Pace that it has done we of course had to try and position ourselves as the conduit I guess to help Architects learn more about that what I think is interesting about AI is that no one really knows that much about it because it's so new in our industry so even though I claim to be a mentor in this area on LinkedIn I'm really just learning at the same time right I don't claim to know a lot but I'm curious and I'm an Explorer in the space and I think that's what's chimed with people on on their other Architects are doing the same thing so we're kind of learning together and in terms of building products I think that that is obviously a huge overlap with the physical materials that go into a building you can't get to the physical Building without starting with this technology and starting with the process turning a concept into a construction turning and rendering into reality is really what architiser is all about in terms of our content all right I'm gonna pull up your LinkedIn account here Paul and for our listeners if you want to see this check out the show notes and or check out this video on YouTube as well if you want to see what we're actually looking at because I know you're probably listening I'll try to do my best to describe what we're looking at here but if you want to see the actual visuals check out the show notes on our website at mbo.com so Paul let's look at this real quickly you're explaining different examples of AI here on your site and then you've got this one the second place I'm looking at here is this AI cheat sheet for Architects and designers which has gotten gosh 1300 likes 92 comments almost 200 reposts my goodness and then you're like highlighting all these different people and what they're doing on architecture and AI talk me through like what you're trying to do here like what is the purpose of this and what is some of the feedback you're getting from architects in this space I think the biggest challenge that everybody's had with AI is the speed with which voices upon us and also the number of different tools and the number of different directions in which we can potentially go with this new tool right it's kind of hard to know where to start and as I say I'm learning with everyone else it's hard for me to know where to start too so one thing I like to do is curate I'm a curator of usually we have architecture projects through archetizer but in this case I'm basically collecting all the information that I can in terms of the tools and the leaders in the space so in the top left corner you can see there's a number of different people that I called out as being great people to follow in terms of knowledge sharing and this is just my personal perspective I'm sure I've missed hundreds of names that could potentially go into this list but I think this is the best place to start because we're all in a learning phase we can't possibly know where to start so actually these people help start Steven is a practicing architect who is experimenting with mid-journey which most people have probably heard of by now creating images from text prompts and each one of these in the list I've kind of given just a taster of what they do in a slightly more focused way so you can kind of Zone in on the people that may be most relevant to you and then a lot of the rest of the sheet is calling out the different tools most people probably heard of chat GPT by now but it turns out there's dozens more like this and then in terms of architecture obviously image generation rendering visualizing Concepts and planning all of these kind of topics they have their own AI tool sets for merging in the space and so I've just listed out some of those that look promising to me I can't guarantee that they are the perfect Real Deal they're obviously all in in the experimental stage themselves but they're a starting point for people to start playing around and exploring because I think that's the best way to learn about AI is just to really like play with these people explore what's nice about them is that and I think why AI has become so popular so fast is because it's not very technical you can really just describe what you want right through a text or through a sketch and then the AI can use that information and create something that a lot of people could never create before in terms of a very photorealistic image and this kind of thing so it's sort of allowing a lot more people to play and to explore Design Concepts along the bottom there's a chat GPT formula which is something from a previous sheet that I made and again it's a starting point because with chapter T you can essentially ask it anything and it can give you somewhat useful information on anything so because it can do anything it's hard to know like what to ask it first so this gives a kind of a template of where you might start you know you might say act as a residential Architects create a client brief template and consider these specific site constraints that you've got from your client we actually have an article where we actually plug those in and we publish the result on archizer and it's pretty good it's quite detailed one thing that's important to note about all of this is that AI is not actually smart the people that put the information in are the key AI is not thinking it's all about taking the information that you provide and using its existing data that it's been trained on and then coming up with the most likely result that you might want so it's not that dissimilar from a search engine in a way but it is able to produce images and words that kind of mimic or mirror human interaction which I think is why it makes it very very accessible for us I want to ask you a question about that that maybe contradicts what you just said because I do think what you just said is really important which is it's not smart it's not creating and that's a big talking point for us when we've talked about AI is at this moment it's not net New Creation it's just being able to put things together in a really similar or smart way but it's not inventing so for years I've been following Architects on LinkedIn and watching them use Bim to create VR and AR models of the buildings that they're building and for a long time that's been what's been talked about is like hey the next wave in technology in architecture is really how Bim is going to directly impact VR and they're like both really kind of cool nerdy parts of that and also like the really important building science infrastructure making sure that your HVAC is a great way to model that out right like making sure that your HVAC is able to flow freely through and you're not getting hot spots cold spots leaks stuff like that what's interesting about what you're talking about a lot on your LinkedIn and you and I both follow this architect his name is Omar nurray and he's from Budapest so I'm very sure that's not how you pronounce his name so I'm sorry Omar if you ever hear this but he's using mid-journey to model out a lot of just different variations of how a building could be visually represented and it's really cool we can post in the show notes also because he goes through like a six to 15 different quick images of just small variations but all that have a really significant visual impact my point is what AI is doing is bringing technology to the beginning of the design cycle instead of kind of bolting it on to the end so where I would want to go with this or what I would love to hear you talk about is how do you see that impacting how design evolves or how design Trends evolve since we now have the ability to iterate 15 different building designs can be visually represented in a matter of minutes that would take potentially months previously what are your thoughts about that it's a great question I love those animations that Omar and others have started to create these image generators used to be so Random so every image was completely different I think what designers struggled with a little bit was the consistency and the control around the tools now there's a little bit more control where you can select one area of an image and you can prompt new parts for that one image which I think is what Omar is doing but I think it becomes quite a profound change in the way that we need to think about design I mentioned curating earlier and I think that the the ability to curate and review different design options suddenly becomes a much more important aspect of this and it's going to be a combination of things right because there are emotional and difficult to measure values in architecture a building can make us feel inspired and can make us feel oppressed or it can make us feel comfort and these are things that where I think that humans at least for now still have one over on AI because these are such difficult things to measure and there's also unique to each individual person so there has to be an element of thinking about which of these 10 options I've just created make me feel good and I'm going to make the user feel good whatever way that might be it obviously will depend on if it's a home a hospital or a school but then there's going to be a much more intelligent layout you were talking about Bim can sort of combining those emotional aspects and those hard to measure aspects with the more technical side of architecture where you might run a design through software that's going to tell you if it's going to be environmentally sound is this particular window pattern going to make the interior way too warm or is it going to be really bad in terms of embodied carbon if we use this material or that material and so there's this really objective measurable data side of things and then there's this hard to measure poetic side of architecture there's always been a tension with those two things it's not a new problem or a new challenge but I think it's exciting because I think a lot of these AI tools as they develop they're going to be able to be combined in more ways to get the best of both of those sides of things and much earlier are in the process like you say but all of it is quite speculative because we don't know where this is taking us right in six months this conversation could be hilariously out of date I'm not sure but it will be exciting to see speaking of which Paul I'd be curious to get your take on where you think this was gonna go which as you said three months ago what we're talking about today is different if you see the trend of what's happening with Architects and how they're using AI where do you see this going you know zoom out a year or two how do you think it's changing the architecture industry as a whole are we just giving the say chat TPT a prompt to spit us out a plan or is it continuing to help the ideation and create a process in a different way obviously I'm biased because I'm an architect Eileen towards the positive on this oh also as an editor by the way it's kind of scary when people can create an essay in a second on on chat GPT you wonder as a writer what that what that means so it's sort of like affecting everyone right now right across all the disciplines in terms of Architects I think this is something that has always been difficult for Architects to articulate and is what is their true value and I don't think their true value has ever been the ability to draw a plan accurately or the ability to create a rendering that looks really realistic right it's something more to do with how are they able to turn their clients needs and desires or the needs of a wider community of its public space into a tangible space and then also be able to communicate that same idea to contractors to product manufacturers and turn this into a real space because ultimately pretty much everything in the AI realm right now is digital and at the end of the day architecture and buildings are physical and they will continue to be created by people there are robots and there's 3D printing and all of this so maybe AI is going to move into the physical more and more in the future but I think it's the communication element that is important and the coordination between different stakeholders and different people you need to be able to make your client happy but you also need to be able to give a brief or give guide evidence to contractors product manufacturers you need to be able to give them something that they can feasibly create and sometimes what the client wants and what's possible in the budget and in the time frame and all of this kind of thing they don't necessarily always align so an architect is a creative mediator I would say that really understates how exciting and inspiring Architects can be but really I think it is a lot about coordination and I think even with all of these new tools it's again it's going to be about using the right tool in the right moment and it's going to be can we combine this software with this software to get the desired outcome there's always going to be a place for somebody to be the pilot of all of those complex moving Parts automation is good for very very narrow tasks but architecture is so complicated and I don't really see it being the whole process from sketch to building in the real world being fully automated In Our Lifetime like even with the pace of AI so there's always going to need to be someone coordinating and driving that process I think this is a great use case for how do we embrace AI even when AI feels like a Potential Threat that's a conversation that everybody's having right now and it's like I mean I have to imagine that at the dawn of true adoption of the internet everybody had a very similar feeling of is the internet just going to take our jobs I was originally a literature major and I wanted to go into publishing and all of my circle was like do you know about this thing it's called the internet and no one's going to read newspapers anymore and nobody's going to read books and that feels very much like the moment that we're in with AI and where we've sat and I love where you guys are sitting is the now let's use it for what we can use it for because there's things that I do in my day that are frankly a waste of my time and not my highest and best use of my brain because like you said Paul I think you articulated it really well which is the thing that a machine can't do is assess a situation on a human need level and then translate that into something really beautiful and creative and functional and then put that into practice but it can take what you do with that and then show you a rendering a lot quicker than you could sketch it up and I don't think there's anything wrong with that like that's exactly where something like this should sit let me ask you one question thinking about that instance taking an architect's idea and putting it into something like mid-journey or if we think about like what Omar is doing and all of his quick turn gifts with the many many iterations from mid-journey if I'm a manufacturer I'm obviously not in mid-journey right that's not a Benjamin more paint color that we're seeing visualized it's not a very specific facade manufacturer that we're seeing visualized there how as a manufacturer should I be thinking about this because I'm not in mid Journeys is this something I need to be trying to figure out how to get my products more into mid-journey where would you say manufacturers need to come into this great question I think that we're all at right and we're like where do I fit in with this as editism writers we're feeling the same way as I said earlier I think I would 100 encourage everybody to play around and explore with these tools even if you don't think that it's going to be relevant to you specifically or your industry specifically it's just good to be able to know what others are using right if Architects are using this tool then it's pretty useful I would say for you to understand how that tool works and I think following all of those people on that LinkedIn post is also a great idea to just absorb knowledge and become familiar with this world right it's huge and daunting and it changes all the time it's a lot so I think learning from others and being a sponge is always good but more specifically to product manufacturers maybe there is a space for product designers certainly on the design side of building products to iterate in the same way and you know you can create so many different swatches and so many different effects using these kind of tools It's tricky because again it's that you're in the curatorial role where you're like okay I created a hundred different Metal finish effects or something like this if you're a clouding manufacturer what do I do with all of this and then I think it comes back down to doing what you've always done if you're a product manufacturer which is to listen to your clients and listen to what are the needs of your community it's great that you can potentially create 100 storage images of different prototypes or different variations of your existing product for example but it doesn't really mean much if you don't know which of those hundred is the one that you're Architects so your clients might want so I think it's kind of interesting in terms of marketing content I would recommend writing about these things and speaking about and writing about how you're learning through these tools and ask others what they think so if you're on LinkedIn or even if you just have some kind of blog on your own website ask your community what they're doing with this what it's surfacing in the way of compelling ideas design ideas and really create a two-way conversation because being able to create a million images in a second is not really that much more helpful right than creating one image over a very long period of time it doesn't really do much for you unless you are able to translate that into some kind of knowledge you could do a survey you could even create 10 images put it out there to your community and say which of these images are most compelling to you and why and so you could use it as a surveying device a visual survey I think it's kind of interesting because you can do it fast as more possible now so in terms of digital prototyping I think it's very compelling these image generators but it's really thinking about how you can make it work for you and your particular Niche and ultimately it doesn't really make a difference unless you know what your client wants or what your client thinks about what you create right so I think that's the most important thing Paul this has been great man thank you so much for just sharing with us and talking through this and I do want to call out real quick before you go that Beth probably likes every single one of your posts and is fangirl everything online you guys have some Awards coming up that I think are important that you should talk about real quick yes yes we have the alcatizer product Awards it's part of our larger a plus award program and it's launching in October and it basically provides a platform for makers of any product across all the different typologies whether it be windows and doors whether it be clouding whether it be Furniture lighting everything you can think of if it's in a building there will be a category for you it's a way to tell your story in a totally different way we highlight winners in all sorts of different ways is there are opportunities to do webinars to have articles on archetize their own be shared with our community the jury is made up of over 200 Architects so just by entering you're gonna get seen by some of the people you probably want to be seen by regardless of the outcome so that's really exciting there's also a public vote as well and we have four million followers across our social media platforms globally so it's a pretty good way to get your products seen you can tell your story in your own words a combination of amazing images and compelling text you can craft your entry any way that you want to and you can also submit a video as part of the entry so there's so many different ways that you can get involved it starts in October and runs through beginning of next year it's all about Innovation so even if it's experimental whatever your newest product is we would love to see it be a part of the program and highlight the Innovations within that well man thank you again for coming on the show this has been great and for our listeners if you enjoyed this make sure you check us out at venvio.com podcast to subscribe and get more until next time I'm Zach Williams alongside Beth plumpy glove thanks everybody [Music]