The Design Prophecy

Graphic By - Aditi Manglurkar, 3A

The semester was drawing to a close. The “end-sem” atmosphere, as architecture students like to call it, filled the studio. I looked around at my friends staring blankly ahead, their eyes matching mine - tired and blurry.

Why blurry you ask? because everyone had just returned from lunch. Which I would describe as a gut fulfilling gastronomical experience! post which my eyes craved for a nap. But the thought of the final jury in 2 days kept haunting me and I forced my eyes to immerse themselves in my 15 inch laptop screen.

Building my 3D model, I continued transforming 2D lines into 3D volumes which honestly felt like quite a mindless job, my ears yearned for gossip around the classroom - something that could keep me hooked while I built my model.

As if on cue, my ears caught something.“It predicts your next move” I heard, intrigued by the statement, I looked away from my screen and turned to the guy who was flabbergasted by a new technology that he had discovered and was expressively narrating it to his friend.

“There is this new AI tool”, he said with a spark in his eyes, “It interprets your next move while modelling and does it for you based on your previous inputs.” He looked at his friend with the excitement of a 3 year old who had witnessed a dove flying out of a magician’s hat at a birthday party.

Intrigued by this new tool, I peeped into his laptop to see what this new discovery was. With every click, I inched further towards them trying to grasp this magic language that promised to perceive our tangled thoughts and vision and generate them into neat readable visuals.

The display screen was screaming at me with a plethora of vivid graphics. An eclectic website with bright colors, fonts all over the place, too many animations all at once. It truly looked like the inside of a brilliant artist’s mind, a whimsical world which could solve all our problems. 

“Input model” a large pop-up appeared on the screen almost as if inviting us to step on to the time machine which would gyrate 360 degrees and take us to the future where we find answers to questions we are unaware of.

Lured by its eccentric colours we instantly clicked on the pop-up and uploaded my half done model. A bold graphic spinning my model all over the screen and projecting it in vectors, it set up its own grid over my model. 

All pending lines were now walls.It did that in half a minute, a 1 hour job and just the way I wanted it to be done almost as if it had read my mind, gone through my design concept, sat through my design reviews it felt like it knew everything. 

My mind instantly started recalculating my work schedule. The model which was going to take 5 hours was just an hour's job now. Suddenly life felt good, I had time for every other little thing I had decided to just push over. Maybe that nap also?

Stimulated by the whims of this software I was determined to complete my model with its partnership. I began to add my inputs and it predicted my next move, sometimes better than I had thought about it - as if it was an upgraded version of my own design.

If my input was a bay window it would transform all openings into beautiful parisian bay windows which perfectly synced with my facade but I had never thought about it that way but it was better than what I thought so I went ahead upgrading every bit of my model just the way it suggested.

In about 2 hours the model was ready squeaky clean straight out of my mind on the laptop. 

I gave a sigh and while rubbing my eyes from the screen strain a little less worried about the jury, things were falling into place - everything felt achievable.

As I took my eyes off the laptop screen I glanced at a crumbled tracing sheet that was lying as a mouse pad on the rough drafting table, it was the elevation I drew at concept stage - raw, rudimentary, unfinished but still complete it gave the essence of the concept I wanted to display and that felt fresh and the model on my screen it was “just perfect”. 

All of this felt a little too good to be true. Was this the truth though? Or was it just an easy escape that would make my design lazy and generic like the rest?  

Was it right to call it mine anymore?

Is my design truly mine without my imperfections ? 

The tracing narrated stories of thought the rough lines, the doodles, the imperfect endings - flawed but still “mine”

Spiralling in this thought staring into the tracing I questioned how AI is taking over us. How soon, every human mind would be stagnated to think beyond what is already built and would only be capable of relying on an intelligence that can form permutations and combinations of what already exists.

Is artificial intelligence helping us become better, or become like it? 

So many questions raced through my mind.

I rubbed my eyes, looking at my desk scattered with tracings and notes. My screen buzzed with a finished project that I wanted to recognize as mine but couldn’t. 

I was left pondering weather to hit Ctrl+Z or let things be…

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Written By - Aditi Manglurkar (Editorial Co-Head)

Durga Harinarayanan (Editorial Associate)