Homeowners have likely encountered various digital tools in their house hunt and in the planning of home design projects. It’s common now to be able to view homes and floorplans in 3D from the comfort of your home, but with tech rapidly evolving, the capacity and functionality of these and other tools is expanding.
Text-to-image prompts through Generative AI, 3D immersive experiences and simulations, AR and other tech tools are helpful in stoking inspiration, articulating design concepts and ultimately helping homeowners narrow down selections.
However, while this tech is cool and engaging, it behooves homeowners to have context around utility to better frame expectations, especially regarding the practicalities of transforming a design concept into a built environment.
What should homeowners know as they start to explore Generative AI, metaverse spaces and other emerging tech in their house hunt?
Livabl spoke to Andrew Lane, co-founder of House of Digby, and Digby, an innovation consultancy and tech company focusing on the architecture and design industry and emerging tech, including the metaverse and Web 3.0.
Lane is also a co-founder of Interior Design Magazine’s Metaverse Architecture and Design Awards (MAD Awards).
Lane shared with Livabl his perspectives on how emerging tech is re-shaping the home buying and home design experience for consumers, what’s happening in the commercial and industrial sectors, and how that may influence what’s next in the residential home buying experience.
More designers are including Generative AI, such as Midjourney, in their workflow. What should consumers be aware of when they create images, or when they are presented with design concepts?
There’s always been a conversation in the industry around licensed versus unlicensed designers. When you start to throw AI into there, it increases consumer choice, but there’s also an ethical consideration.
With designers that are using AI, it’s really beneficial when it’s deployed as a transparent co-pilot to the work as opposed to being something that a designer might pass off as being original intellectual property, where they’re not being fully transparent with their client about where the ideas are coming from.
This leads into another, important consideration from the homeowner/client standpoint that these (Generative AI) designs, as they currently are, are visual inspirations, not architectural drawings. They’re not built to code. They’re not built with the realities of budget fabrication or regional considerations.
These designs are not that at this point. But that’s not to say that this technology won’t come quickly.
There’s a whole host of benefits to being able to iterate quickly and in real time. That’s something that Gen AI is doing a great job of and the promise of connecting into full spatial technology with consumer applications is coming really, really fast.
It won’t be long before voice prompts can turn into the actual creation of a 3D immersive space that people are going to be able to understand with even more depth than the images that a lot of people are working off of right now.
Is the challenge of physically building AI-generated design concepts something that homeowners are commonly encountering?
I heard a really fascinating story when I was at an industry event from a contractor, who told me about a young “designer” who was using digital tools in order to create designs and building up what seemed to be a pretty healthy design business with a lot of local residents.
But what was happening was those designs were getting signed off on at the design level and then the people were going out to shop for contractors.
The homeowners were having conflict with the contractors because they weren’t able to build the vision. They (homeowners) didn’t understand that they’d signed off on a pretty picture as opposed to a bonded architectural drawing that can actually be constructed with safety standards etc.
It’s just really important to know as a purchaser, what you’re buying, who you’re buying it from, what are the inputs being used for the outcome, and the degree to which this beautiful inspirational piece is actually practical.
How should homeowners use digital tools to facilitate their decision making? Within the tools, what utilities offer the most efficient and precise information?
The digital tools that will become the market leaders are the ones that combine elements (digital + physical). In other words, the tools that provide a well thought-out and useful introduction to different design options, and therefore allow you to make the best decision you could have.
(Once you’ve done the initial research digitally), you can go and touch and see the design and the finishes etc. physically.
I think that there’s climate for tools such as avatars.
Let’s say you are designing a kitchen; you could have an avatar that accurately represents you, so you would know if a particular counter came up to the midpoint of your waist, for example.
Adjusting your avatar’s gaze point can help you to understand the space and the products around you from your own vantage point when you can’t be there, which has a ton of value.
And we’re seeing augmented reality tools specifically for things like paint and flooring, where you can get a sense of what those choices would look like in your home.
But you also need to consider color, and how it changes in different daylight. The best tools that we have seen let you try out different lighting scenarios (day, evening, direct, indirect light). It’s this kind of simulation that is creating tools that can help people make better decisions.
And tools aren’t about removing roles or jobs, they are about augmenting (the process).
Homeowners may have experienced the consumer-focused metaverse through gaming, retail or lifestyle experiences. However, it’s the industrial metaverse that is currently demonstrating benefits, particularly when it comes to efficiencies in the building and design process, with digital twinning, simulation and other emerging tech in commercial developments and application.
How will these principles benefit the process with residential housing, and by extension, homeowners?
In commercial building and large-scale development, they are already starting to take visualizations and translate them into construction documents. They are doing 3D scans with really precise digital documents, to change structural things quickly and efficiently, rather than getting along in the build process and having to rewind.
This will eventually be of benefit to the homeowner too. Theoretically, this should give general contractors a lot more information to predict things for homeowners with more clarity and more efficiency because the guesswork is removed by having so much, and such accurate, digital information available.
There is a ton of future potential (for the residential market), but the amount of investment that’s required in order to get to those tools is something that’s few and far between firms at this point.
The technology is moving so fast that you’re going to see prices coming down. And you’re going to start to see companies come into the market with tools that residential-level contractors and builders are going to be able to use in a much more efficient way.
What should consumers keep in mind on their house hunt, or when embarking on their home renovation project?
I think the biggest theme here is these are tools that are here to help us. As with any tools, there are some safety instructions.
You want to make sure you’re aware of what might go wrong if you’re not operating them properly.
Even at this early stage, there’s a ton of utility that can be drawn out of them. And there’s a ton of opportunities for using them. It’s just exciting to think about how much this is going to improve in the next few years.
