Architecture Students on AI
Read the full article in Common Edge: “Architecture Students on AI.”
In fall 2024, professor Deutsch led an architecture AI Studio with several students who were new to architecture and even new to this country as exchange students. The goal of the AI studio was to design solutions to a pressing issue: Chicago’s need to address its unhoused population by developing 126,000 affordable housing units. Throughout the course students learned how to prompt AI tools and understand them as collaborators or idea generators rather than as replacement for actual human designers, and to understand AI “hallucinations” differently:
Excerpt:
“Design teams benefited from AI’s tendency to hallucinate, where AI models inadvertently generate incorrect or misleading results. Instead of thinking of hallucinations as errors or mistakes, as is often reported in the media, students reframed them as unexpected or provocative design suggestions, recognizing that to innovate using AI, hallucination should be seen as a feature, not a bug. One example involved a student team’s predominantly concrete housing development bridging over a highway that was mistaken by AI to be built using mass timber. Instead of stressing, ignoring the mistake, or trying to correct it, the team took this incorrect observation on the part of AI as a provocation, recommendation, or design suggestion, looked into the advantages of using CLT for their project, and, with input from a structures professor, made the design change to great improvement and design impact.”