A grant from the Angelo Donghia Foundation will be used to explore the potential of artificial intelligence, or AI, in design education and the creative process.

The $34,900 grant is the latest in a series of awards to the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design's Department of Interior Architecture and Design from the Donghia Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes design education. In total, the Fay Jones School has received more than $250,000 in grants and student scholarships over the past eight years.

"The continued and repeated support from the Donghia Foundation positions our program in the top echelon of design programs in North America," said Carl Matthews, professor and head of the Department of Interior Architecture and Design.

Between 2015 and 2019, four interior design students in the school were each recognized with a $30,000 Senior Student Scholarship Award, which is the largest, most prestigious award within interior design education. In 2022, the school received a $46,700 grant from the Donghia Foundation to transform the Materials Lab from a traditional materials library into a teaching, making and research workshop. The year before, in 2021, the foundation awarded the school a $49,000 grant to explore the potential benefits of using virtual reality technology in design education.

The Donghia Foundation Inc. was established by the late Angelo Donghia, an internationally recognized interior design icon and source of inspiration to the design world. Among the foundation's purposes is the advancement of education in the field of interior design.

This latest grant will allow the principal investigators, Torrey Tracy, Michelle Huh and Marjan Miri, to purchase a mobile AI laboratory and to fund a series of workshops from experts in the field of AI software. The mobile AI laboratory will include six laptops, equipped with optimal graphics cards, memory capabilities and the most utilized AI software installed. The mobile lab will help with student collaboration and alleviate costs for students.

But students will not be restricted on which platforms they can use on projects. Miri, assistant professor of interior architecture and design, said the AI options are growing daily.

"I ask them to research and see which of the platforms is more useful for the work that they want to produce," Miri said. "If they only want to write a sentence and have an image, they can use specific platforms."

And as students get more comfortable with using the technology, they would even have the option to incorporate their own computer code into their work, said Huh, assistant professor of interior architecture and design. But initially, the goal is for students to see the different perspectives that AI offers.

As students have adopted the software, the biggest trial they have faced is learning how to write the prompts.

"It was a little bit challenging for students because they thought, when they are writing a sentence, immediately it's going to give them what they want," Miri said. "But it's not like that. It takes maybe 10 or 12 iterations and adding more detail to that sentence or to that sketch to make it close to what they want."

While students may find the process frustrating, the iterative process is at the heart of design and what the faculty are trying to accomplish using AI, said Tracy, assistant professor of interior architecture and design.

"Hopefully something like that will show students the value of really working towards perfecting something, even if it means changing one word to get that perfect end result, to get the result that they want that's in their head, rather than what the computer's telling them that they have to have," Tracy said.

And the process of writing the prompts is also important to the design process.

"Describing your work, talking about your work, writing about your work, is vital," Tracy said. "Students need to have the right words to express what they're designing. They need to have passion and conviction. If they're not writing that out, they're not going to fully get that yield."

Students will be introduced to the AI software through lectures and tutorials from visiting professionals and artists. Then, students will explore the technology through exercises and projects.

After achieving this basic level of understanding of AI technology, students will use it in more in-depth ways. Intermediate students will develop a small project concept based on a given prompt without using AI. Next, they will use AI to answer the same prompt. This will allow them to explore aspects they did not originally consider. Finally, students will finalize a concept that is the combination of their initial ideas with the AI developed examples. Tracy said this exercise will help students practice AI as a tool, and not as a generator for their final product.

"Students need to earn the right to let the computer do work for them," Tracy said. "They have to be better than the computer. The computer's a tool that does things quicker, but it's not going to do the work for them."

In the advanced stage, students will expand the scope of their AI exploration to understand the field of interior architecture beyond their design products. They will use AI as a tool to visualize the poetic and emotional realm of interior architecture. Huh said as students grow comfortable using AI technology, it can also help with creative burnout.

"We found the students want to create, but they struggle to get inspired," Huh said. "They want to have cool ideas, but they struggle with the spark of inspiration. So maybe they can use AI as a tool so that they can be more creative."

Looking at projects through the lens of the objective computer will allow students to understand interior space as a multi-layered reality that is created by interactions between users, space and environments. This phase aims for students to be able to design and/or control AI algorithms to effectively visualize their concepts as well as use them for idea ideation.

Tracy said the hope is that when students graduate, they will have a higher understanding of AI as a tool.

"As faculty, we are showing them the usefulness of those tools, how to apply those tools, but to apply them as a tool for their own and original and unique understanding," Tracy said.

"This latest grant is an example of the continuing collaboration within the Interior Architecture and Design Department at the Fay Jones School," Miri said.

Huh and Tracy agreed, saying they are thankful for their fellow faculty members partnering with them to champion AI research in the design field.

Tracy, Huh and Miri, along with other interior architecture and design faculty, plan to incorporate the equipment and research into fall 2023 and spring 2024 studios and compile their research in the summer of 2024.  

The grant will also be used to host a poster design competition open to all Fay Jones School students who attend the AI workshops offered in the spring 2024 semester. The competition will be to design posters that showcase what students learned in the AI workshops.