Behind every intricately designed hotel or restaurant lies a symbiotic collaboration between designer and creator.
But in reality, companies want to build more with less – and even if visions are created by designers, they don’t always succeed in bringing them to reality. Instead, intermediaries may be responsible for purchasing and overseeing the financial costs of executing designs.
“The process is often not as linear as we [designers] “We wish it was, and sometimes we even get cut off slightly, and something comes out the other side that wasn’t quite what we expected,” said Tina Norden, partner and principal at design firm Conran and Partners, at the Fortune Brainstorm Design forum in Macau on Dec. 2.
“To have a better quality product, communication is essential,” added Daisuke Hironaka, CEO of Stellar Works, a Shanghai-based furniture company.
Yet purchasing people are often “money people” who don’t necessarily value good design and instead abandon it to cut costs. There is a need to increase awareness of the business value of good design, Norden argued.
When you build something, she says, there is both a capital investment and a life-cycle cost. “If you spend a little more money on good quality furniture, flooring etc. they should probably last a lot longer and therefore offer much better value for money.”
Investing in well-designed products is also better for the environment, Norden added, because they don’t have to be replaced as quickly.
Attempts to cut costs could also backfire in the long run, Hironaka said, because business owners could face higher maintenance bills if products are poorly designed and manufactured.
AI in interior and furniture design
Although designers have largely been slow to adopt AI, some luminaries like Daisuke are trying to integrate it into their team’s workflow.
AI can help speed up the custom furniture design process, Daisuke said, especially for large-scale projects like hotels.
A team can take between a month and 45 days to create designs for 200 pieces of custom furniture, the designer explained, but AI can speed up this process. “We’ve designed a lot of things in the past, and if AI can use these archives, study [them] and help do the engineering, making it more useful for designers.
Still, designers can rest easy because AI can never replace the human touch they provide, Norden said.
“There’s something about human contact and understanding how we like to use our spaces, how we value space, how we perceive spaces, that will always be there, but AI should be something that can help us. [in] get to that point faster.
She added that creatives can instead view AI as a tool for tasks that take time but “don’t require ultimate creativity,” such as researching and bringing designs into three dimensions.
“As designers, we like to procrastinate and think about things for a long time to make them perfect, [but] we can get help to do things faster.
