Echoes of Parow Interactive exhibit, South African Jewish Museum, Cape Town, South Africa
How to Carefully Introduce Artificial Intelligence in Our Work as a Design Firm
In formula D_’s design team, AI is seen as a bit of a mixed bag of pros and cons. If AI were a team member of flesh and bone, it would be the one who is incredibly talented but doesn’t really listen well and requires a lot of (micro)management. Often, the outcomes look convincingly perfect in isolation, but we frequently ask ourselves: do they really represent what we had in mind?
So, how can we use AI in our work in experiential design without compromising the intentionality of our design? From enhancing efficient workflows to pushing the boundaries of design, AI can support various tasks within the workflows of a creative business. Here’s a glimpse into how AI empowers formula D_’s design team.
Creating Concept Art with AI
Art Director Anca Popa uses AI to create concept art and mood images. For a recent exhibition project that included life-size images of historic figures, “We fed AI with grainy old photographs and got life-sized, hyper-realistic images that did a great job of bringing those characters back to life.” However, Anca notes, “The work that goes into fine-tuning and fixing AI-generated images with more traditional tools can be very time-consuming.” She also uses AI to generate ideas, both visual and textual, for a ‘second opinion’ and to upscale low-resolution images.
Efficient Project Planning
Project Director and Lead Strategist Thinus Venter uses AI to assemble large, complex timelines for bid documents across multiple disciplines. Recently, he prepared two iterations of timelines and team structures for a U.S. client’s tender, uploading key dates and deliverables for the core program and using AI to weave in other teams’ milestones over five- and ten-year periods. This task, which would normally have taken two days, was completed in 1½ hours. Thinus also uses AI to create scripts for computational 3D design.
Streamlining Storyboarding and Documentation
Head of Design Jean-Jacques Rossouw uses AI for fact-checking and grammar review across multiple languages during content development, analyzing user flow diagrams, and suggesting optimizations that improve the visitor experience. JJ has also found that AI can play a significant role in creating concept art and generating storyboard visuals, which greatly streamlines the creative process.
Additionally, JJ utilizes AI-generated sound effects and voice-overs for quick and inexpensive options, but he remains aware of AI’s limitations. “I prefer live voice-overs as they allow me more creative flexibility,” he says. “I find that AI lacks soul.” AI-generated imagery also enables him to create precise visual depictions of complex subjects that would otherwise be challenging and costly to produce.
JJ’s perspective is shared across formula D_: “We don’t blindly trust AI; it can produce a lot of errors. AI is a servant, not the boss. As creatives, we regard AI as part of our toolset, like Photoshop and other creative tools, rather than a final solution, but we are also aware of its ever-expanding capabilities.”
At formula D_, AI serves as a creative tool that enhances, rather than defines, our work. It supports efficiency across diverse projects, empowering our team to spend more time working directly with clients and focusing on the creative process. In our next blog, we’ll explore the ethical side of AI and formula D_’s commitment to using it responsibly in the creative industry, featuring further insights from our team. Stay tuned!
