A local interior design company in Saskatoon has teamed up with Saskatchewan Polytechnic to bring artificial intelligence into the world of design. Tamara Bowman, the Creative Director at Metric Design, is excited about the potential of this partnership. She believes that the AI software being developed by students at Sask. Polytech’s Digital Integration Centre of Excellence (DICE) will revolutionize the design industry.
Currently, adjusting a room’s measurements, furniture, and color scheme is a time-consuming and tedious process for designers. With over $730,000 in grant money from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Mitacs, students at DICE are working on two innovative AI programs.
The first program is a digital room-twinning software that focuses on the physical layout of a room. This will allow designers to make adjustments to windows and walls without the need for complex CAD/CAM programs. The second program is a generative AI software that aims to incorporate the preferences of both the client and the designer into the design process.
According to Dr. Cyril Coupal, the research manager at DICE, these programs will streamline the design process and reduce the potential for errors that can occur when manually entering information into spreadsheets.
Tamara Bowman highlights the challenges that designers face when selecting products for a project. The vast array of choices available in the market makes it difficult to narrow down selections, leading to increased time and costs for clients. The new AI software will simplify this process, significantly reducing design time and ultimately saving money for both designers and clients.
The digital room-twinning project is expected to be completed in the next eight months, while the AI generative aspect may take up to three years to finalize. Once these programs are ready, they will first be tested within Metric Design before being made available for consumer trials. Eventually, the goal is for these AI tools to become a preferred service for designers in the industry.
This collaboration between Metric Design and Saskatchewan Polytechnic represents a significant step forward in the integration of artificial intelligence into the field of interior design. The innovative technology being developed has the potential to transform the way designers work, making the design process more efficient and cost-effective for all parties involved.