How A.I. Will Change the Design Brief in 2025
Design in ‘25: The Near Future of Architecture & A.I., Pt. 1
In This Post:
Unpacking 2024 . . .
In 2025 . . .
Architecture Gets ‘WebMD’d’
Briefs Start Expecting, Detailing A.I. Expectations, Risk, Security
Unpacking 2024 . . .
For 2024, I had predicted that A.I. will change the design brief by making buildings smarter, clients more demanding, and programs more flexible.
The surging popularity of adaptive reuse suggests that clients and designers are increasingly looking for more programming flexibility. Some of these efforts are quite hideous, like this recent example of converting a shopping mall into housing. As the cost of carbon continues to rise, we’ll inevitably want to avoid these kinds of chimera projects and, seeking long-term value for a property, we’ll look to design every building in a way that can accommodate changing programs, demographics and climates.
We'll inevitably point the camera in the other direction: if we want a building to be adaptively reused in the future, how would we design it? The easy answer has always been there: open floor plan, warehouse-style. The harder design endeavor is to figure out how one building can fit around several different programs, rather than forcing several different programs to fit inside one building.
I also forecasted that we’d start talking about embedding intelligence within buildings. That conversation hasn’t taken off yet, but I’m convinced the theory is sound ;-).
In movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien, the spacecraft on which the protagonists reside & travel is an embodied intelligence – the ship has a brain. Granted, that intelligence is eventually revealed to be either the villain or an accomplice to the villainy. But it doesn’t have to be so. Having a building with a brain allows for an intelligent, reciprocal relationship between a building and its occupants.
The way we design buildings now, that relationship would be of limited utility for either party. It wouldn’t allow you to do much of anything except maybe turn the Heating/AC up and down, or operate the lights. But what if you designed a building, de novo, anticipating that it would have a non-human, intelligent consciousness? How might our built environment be an active partner in the way that we work, and the way that we live? What could a building do, if it were, for all intents and purposes, alive?
In 2025 . . .
Architecture Gets ‘WebMD’d’
A more ominous trend emerged in 2024: the 'WebMD-ification' of all professional services, including architecture. A.I. is 'professionalizing' all clients in the same way that WebMD professionalized doctors’ patients.
A.I. has already become capable of answering basic questions that previously lay exclusively in the domains of human architects, contractors and engineers. Non-professionals can have a lot of their own questions answered now by AI, as evidenced in this video by Ethan Mollick, a Wharton business school professor. In the video, Mollick feeds Claude a video of a construction site, and asks it to come up with a punch list, which it does.
A Brief is just a list of tasks and series of outcomes that the client wishes the architect to achieve. If the client believes that they can now do some of those tasks, it's reasonable to expect that they'll alter the brief accordingly.
Ask any doctor what the most irritating part of their day is, and they'll tell you 'Dr. Google' - the phenomena whereby patients come into the office, already having diagnosed their own illnesses, and are only there to make use of the Dr.'s prescription pad. Doctors will also tell you that it's a mixed blessing: they have better informed patients than ever before, but the risks are higher. A doctor initially diagnoses through questions, and now must filter a patient’s responses through a patient’s pre-existing belief about their own diagnosis.
Platforms like Midjourney and DALL-E don’t allow a client to design a building. But they allow a client to think they can. Architects should expect that in the future, clients will come into the first meeting with a highly articulated ‘vision’ of what their future project is going to look like, compliments of Midjourney. I’ve already heard of this happening from several colleagues.
Just like doctors do now, architects of the future are going to have to spend part of their time gently deprogramming a client’s vision, and explaining why that beautiful rendering that it took them all of twenty minutes to complete isn’t actually a viable design for a building.
Briefs Start Expecting, Detailing A.I. Expectations, Risk, Security
Throughout 2025, we’ll normalize the use of A.I. in everything, and that will extend to clients, too. They’ll expect their architects to use AI, even if it’s not explicit in the brief. The thing is, all A.I. comes with some measure of risk. Neural networks, ML algorithms and such have a ‘black box’ nature, where it’s not always understood why an A.I. comes up with the responses that it does.
The general issue of A.I. Liability is unfolding. But as everyone uses A.I. more, the stakes will be raised. At some point in 2025, you’ll read a story about a catastrophic business failure caused by AI, akin to the ‘Flash Crash’ crisis of 2010, wherein trading algorithms developed by a single London-based trader triggered a market crash that wiped out $1 Trillion in market value.
Savvy clients will know that their architects are using AI, and will take steps to protect themselves. Some protection will continue to flow out of Professional Liability and E&O Insurance. However, as those insurance companies see how much architects are using AI, they’ll take steps to protect themselves, too, potentially by adding exclusions to policies.
How a client manages this short term volatility depends on the client, the program and the architect. But expect to see the question being raised: “How are you using AI, and how am I protected from the mistakes that A.I. sometimes makes?”
If you enjoyed that, be sure to check out Part 2 of this series: 'How A.I. Will Change How Architects Design in 2025’ and subscribe below for all future updates.