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Harvard Graduate School of Design Offers Online Course on AI for Architects

2023-11-13T09:15:00-05:00

This post is brought to you by Harvard Graduate School of Design Executive Education

A year after the launch of ChatGPT and the proliferation of generative AI tools, there remains enormous potential for architects able to harness AI-driven tools to solve their core challenges. That is why Harvard University Graduate School of Design Executive Education offers a course on AI, Machine Learning, and the Built Environment to design leaders seeking to understand this transformative technology better.

We asked Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo y Lopez, Lecturer in Architectural Technology at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, questions about AI in preparation for this January's program.

Courtesy of Harvard GSD Executive Education

Question: “I’m an architect. Can AI design buildings? Is my job getting replaced by AI?

Answer: “AI cannot design entire buildings, but it is true that certain aspects, more and more aspects of the architectural design process are being automated using A...

Construction robotics market could triple by 2030, reaching $164 million

2022-08-25T12:01:00-04:00

New research suggests that the global market for construction robotics will triple by 2030. The figures, generated by Straits Research, predict that the construction robotics market will grow from its current $50 million value to reach $164 million by the end of the decade, increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14%.

“Primary factors promoting the shift towards adopting robots in the construction industry are enhanced productivity, quality, worker safety, and global urbanization,” the research says, noting that robotics could eliminate or mitigate the risks of human error, operate in hazardous environments, and improve precession and efficiency during the construction process. Straits also identifies the “demolition robot market” as a submarket expected to experience growth.

Designing healthier spaces through data: How one firm uses spatial analytics to shape new job opportunities for architects

2022-03-02T09:06:00-05:00

Traditional architecture firms aren't the only viable employers worth exploring as designers and architects continue to navigate the job market. New and exciting job opportunities with unique architecture adjacent practices continue to emerge with businesses seeking the expertise of individuals with architecture backgrounds. Pair this with advances in AR/VR, visualization modeling, and data analytics architects are finding new ways to approach healthcare, housing, and commercial projects.

Take the Cambridge-based spatial analytics company Spatio Metrics for example. Its founders, Sonal Singh and Jim Peraino, have combined their business, wellness, and architecture backgrounds to develop a company that "helps architects and their clients analyze floor plans and bridge the gap between design, data, and human performance."

Image courtesy of Spatio Metrics.

Both MIT graduates, the duo founded their company in 2019 and has gained attention as a startup that uses spatial analytics, visuali...

Autodesk acquires tech company that uses AI to help architects make design decisions

2020-11-18T18:05:00-05:00

Autodesk, Inc. today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Spacemaker for $240 million net of cash... The acquisition of Spacemaker provides Autodesk with a powerful platform to drive modern, user-centric automation – powered by AI – and accelerate outcome-based design capabilities for architects.

According to Autodesk, the Oslo, Norway-based Spacemaker "uses cloud-based, artificial intelligence (AI), and generative design to help architects, urban designers, and real estate developers make more informed early-stage design decisions faster and enables improved opportunities for sustainability from the start. By evaluating the best options from the outset, Spacemaker helps architects maximize their clients’ long-term property investments."

Amazon opens first cashierless grocery store in Seattle

2020-03-09T11:19:00-04:00

Amazon [has opened] its first grocery store to pilot the use of the retailer’s cashierless “Just Walk Out” technology that has previously powered 25 Amazon Go convenience stores in a handful of major U.S. metros. Based in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, the new Amazon Go Grocery store allows customers to shop for everyday grocery items like fresh produce, meat, seafood, bakery items, household essentials, dairy, easy-to-make dinner options, beer, wine and spirits, and more.

According to TechCrunch, the store is 7,700 square feet in the front of house and 10,400 square feet overall, making it the largest use of Amazon's Just Walk Out technology to date. With a similar model to the Amazon Go convenience stores, shoppers use the Amazon Go app to check themselves in as they enter the store. Once inside, users shop as they typically would. Sensors and cameras monitor the items removed from shelves and add them to the shopper's virtual cart. Once the shopper exits the store, the software charges the card the customer has on file, TechCrunch reports.

Microsoft plans to preserve cultural heritage sites through AI

2019-07-17T13:17:00-04:00

The plan is the fourth pillar in a five-year philanthropic effort dubbed AI for Good, which already includes previously announced target areas centered on the earth, humanitarian action and accessibility. The $10m cultural heritage initiative will focus on finding ways to celebrate people, language, places and historic artifacts,

Microsoft, a leader in the tech industry, has initiated a new extension to their $125M AI for Good program. The company aims to use artificial intelligence as a way to preserve cultural heritage. According to an announcement made by Microsoft President Brad Smith, "We want technology to advance, but we all want, and should want, to preserve timeless values around the world." Microsoft has teamed up with two French companies, HoloForge Interactive and Iconem.

Both specializing in 3D digital renderings to help recreate photo-realistic models of historic cultural sites, this new collaboration is exploring interactive experiences with 3D model making.

HoloForge Interactive used these 3D renderings to travel back in time by using the HoloLens augmented reality headset. Image courtesy of Microsoft

By preserving these sites, new opportunities for cultural exchange and interaction grow. Iconem's co-founder Yves Ubelmann shares, "3D digital models will allow people to travel not only throug...

This AI converts simple sketches into photorealistic landscapes—and architecture will be next

2019-03-20T15:10:00-04:00

Today at Nvidia GTC 2019, the company unveiled a stunning image creator. Using generative adversarial networks, users of the software are with just a few clicks able to sketch images that are nearly photorealistic. The software will instantly turn a couple of lines into a gorgeous mountaintop sunset. This is MS Paint for the AI age.

The GauGAN image creation system Nvidia presented this week is an impressive foreshadowing of AI's rapid advancement into creative fields, like art and architecture—and a frightening example of the increasing ease of producing (nearly) photorealistic inauthentic imagery.

Screenshot of the GauGAN app. Image: Nvidia.

The possibilities of this crude demo tool for future, more sophisticated architectural application are hauntingly plentiful, and the company already hints at exactly that in its announcement: "GauGAN could offer a powerful tool for creating virtual worlds to everyone from architects and urban planners to landscape designers and game developers. With an AI that understands how the real world looks, these professionals could better prototype ideas and make rapid changes to a synthetic scene."

Demonstration of Nvidia's GauGAN system. Video via Nvidia on YouTube.

Since neural networks generate creations based on the set of images they have been trained on, will the creative r...

Is data the key to AI shining in architecture, or will it eventually replace us?

2018-12-28T16:55:00-05:00

The core issue centers around the idea that creatives will be replaced by super-intelligent robots to design buildings, create art, or design vehicles. Yet even as AI evolves across other design-related industries, AI could prove to do more good than bad, tackling the mundane so that you can augment your creative process.

Artificial Intelligence has already changed the nature of industries like manufacturing and cybersecurity. However, where does architecture fit into this mix? A harrowing concern is super intelligent robots may replace the creative practice and take over the design process that architects and designers spend years studying. However, with this new found accessibility in automation and AI, perhaps there is way for architects to view more pros than cons.

MX3D Bridge Image © MX3D

At the heart of AI is an understanding, processing, and translation of data. By processing massive amounts of data at a rapid rate, AI allows for fabrication and prototyping to happen in an instant. For an architect, the quick processing of data allows for more room to reinvest time in design. Countless hours of research goes into starting any new project and with the help of data, architects can acquire building codes and zoning data at the touch of a button.

As one of the largest byproducts of the 21st centur...

Optimizing floorplans via experimental algorithms

2018-12-21T14:13:00-05:00

Recent computational tools that model the simulation of traffic, acoustics and heat conservation, among others, are allowing a more quantitative objective evaluation of forms. The metrics could be expanded to include terrain maps, sun paths, existing trees and other environmental input, allowing the buildings to be highly adaptive to their context. The physics simulation could force certain boundary shape constraints.

Evolving Floorplans is an experimental research project created by a New York-based programmer, Joel Simon. When approaching floorplan design solely through the angle of optimization, a genetic algorithm arranges the rooms and the flow of people in a manner that minimizes things like walking time, the use of hallways, etc. The layout 'grows' from the encoding using methods such as graph contraction and ant-colony inspired algorithms, resulting in something 'biological in appearance, intriguing in character, and wildly irrational in practice'.

This AI-powered & LiDAR-equipped robot could soon help detect construction errors early

2018-02-23T15:39:00-05:00

Using lidar-equipped robots, Doxel scans construction sites every day to monitor how things are progressing, tracking what gets installed and whether it’s the right thing at the right time in the right place. You’d think that construction sites would be doing this by themselves anyway, but it turns out that they really don’t, and in a recent pilot study on a medical office building, Doxel says it managed to increase labor productivity on the project by a staggering 38 percent.

"You could send in some humans with lidar backpacks, but that would be more expensive," IEEE Spectrum explains. "The company is also using drones in a limited capacity right now, since they require human supervision, but it’s easy to imagine how much more efficient this process could get as robotic autonomy improves."

Where cars learn how to drive like people

2017-08-28T15:02:00-04:00

Even within the polygon abstraction of the simulation the AI uses to know the world, there are traces of human dreams, fragments of recollections, feelings of drivers. And these components are not mistakes or a human stain to be scrubbed off, but necessary pieces of the system that could revolutionize transportation, cities, and damn near everything else.

Waymo is Google's self-driving technology company that was launched in 2009. Since developing 'world’s first and only fully self-driving ride on public roads' in 2015, they've introduced fully autonomous Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans and started an early rider program which invites residents in Phoenix, AZ to join a public trial of self-driving vehicles that shapes the cars' evolution.

The Atlantic got to tour the company's training campus, Carcraft, reporting on the complex system behind the smart cars' learning environment where the digitization of the real-world driving takes place. There, single driving maneuvers and scenarios—like one car cutting off the other on a roundabout—are amplified into thousands of simulated scenarios that probe the edges of the cars' capabilities, forming Waymo's AI simulation apparatus.

The cars are training in both—the virtual and the real world, driving over 8 million miles per day through the fully modeled, digital versions of Austin, Mountain...

This Man Designed an AI to Generate British Placenames

2017-07-21T12:21:00-04:00

As any American who tuned into the last British election realized, UK placenames are a bit out there (at least to American ears, that is), from Droop in Dorset to Westward Ho! in Devon. So Dan Ho decided to train a (quirky) AI to generate its own.

Here are some of the ones the computer crafted:

Ospley
Stoke Carrston
Elfordbion
Hevermilley
Ell
Elle’s Chorels
Capton Briins Forehouint Eftte Green
Waryburn Torner Midlwood
Wasts Halkstack
Kinindworthorpe Marmile
Dompton Ole
Dimmer Common
Pairinggleat
Catley Holtbridgeham Ruse
Colon-in Mead

Check out the full list, as well as how he did it, here.

Amazon's newest venture promises to shake up retail design—and eliminate the need for cashiers altogether

2016-12-06T12:42:00-05:00

“No lines. No checkouts. No registers. Welcome to Amazon Go.” The newest “disruption” offered by Silicon Valley promises to radically shake up retail design in the name, per usual, of increased efficiency. Located in Seattle, the Amazon Go store is a market without cashiers. Instead, shoppers simply download an app that gives them access to the store. As they pick up items, their virtual shopping cart is automatically adjusted. When they leave the store, a bill is sent to their Amazon account. Amazon Go uses computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning—a technology bundle Amazon has dubbed ‘Just Walk Out’—to track the shopping experience.

Of course, this newest innovation could radically change the way we design retail environments. It also means Amazon will know even more about our shopping preferences and be able to tailor advertisements ever more precisely. Perhaps most importantly, Amazon Go threatens to eliminate the need for cashiers. Currently, 3.4 million Americans work ...

Questioning urban truisms with artificial intelligence

2016-08-10T14:11:00-04:00

computer vision and artificial intelligence are the keys to a debate behind a door that’s been locked for a long time: the social impact of design in cities. [...] "Now that we have new tools to measure aesthetics, we can estimate its consequences" [...] [MIT Media Lab associate professor Cesar Hidalgo] wants to develop more empirical ways to study cities and the way they’re perceived—and, in turn, provide better science to the policy-makers who shape legislation.

More on neural networks and aesthetic quantification:

Mark Zuckerberg's resolution for 2016: build an at-home AI "like Jarvis in Iron Man"

2016-01-05T15:32:00-05:00

"I'm very interested in using voice and face recognition to set lights and temperature as well depending on who is in what rooms, etc," he writes. [...] The really interesting part of Zuckerberg's AI plan is when it moves past standard smart home controls and into his work. Describing the "simple AI" that he intends to build, Zuckerberg writes, "On the work side, it'll help me visualize data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively."

You can read Mark Zuckerberg's entire Facebook post on his AI home-plan here. Referring to already commercially available "smart home" technologies (such as temperature, entertainment, or security controls), Zuckerberg plans to build on existing products to make them more responsive with less input – to be able to recognize his presence vs. his wife's, for example, without either of them "announcing" themselves to the tech.

More heavy-hitting forays into the "smart home":

A competition entry for Evolo 2015 that doesn't include a skyscraper

2015-05-13T00:39:00-04:00

We have new technologies in architecture those makes us feel excited when we see them applied on a facade, a roof etc. or simply used for designing. That gives us ideas about what we can design with which technologies. And we honestly believe that designing a building with high ecologic qualities is the only responsibility we have. In most of the cases that's correct. But do you really not responsible what happens while that building is being constructed.

In a construction site thousands of vehicles brings you materials. Those lorries, trucks etc. are not eco-friendly at all! You construct support structures only to construct the main thing and you say you can recycle those. Recycling is a good deed but the process itself has lots of disadvantages like unsafe and unhygienic recycling sites, and the recycled materials starts to have a shorter lifespan. And do you have any excuse of having people work on dangerous construction sites, especially when you construct a skyscraper! Even tho...