How we use AI
We use paid AI subscriptions selectively to help with communication, research, administration, visualisation and additional checks. Our goal is to improve efficiency of our administrative and project management processes.
But AI does not make our design decisions. Our highly skilled team remain responsible for the advice and work we produce. We assess the tools we use carefully, take care with project information and privacy and QA important findings to ensure a human eye is over all of our project decisions.
How AI can help you
We’re all for using AI to make the design process easier to understand and participate in. There are some genuinely useful ways it can help, and a few ways we’ve found it can make things trickier.
We’re not the AI police, but our experiences so far have taught us a thing or two!
What we encourage:
- Exploring ideas we’ve already discussed: Using AI to visualise particular finishes, materials or colours within an agreed design direction. It can be a handy way to feel more confident about a decision without changing the design itself.
- Communicating your thoughts: Editing emails or feedback for clarity, while keeping the ideas and opinions your own.
- Making sense of information: Summarising our emails, reports or technical information to help you get your head around more complex issues. Although our job is to simplify and demystify things too, so if something doesn’t make sense, please just ask us!
- Using it as a sounding board: Talking through your thoughts, working out what you like (or don’t like) and finding the words to explain it before bringing those conversations back to us.
What we ask you not to do:
- Use AI to write your design brief: We want to hear what matters to you, in your own words, imperfections and all! An AI-generated brief might sound great, but it can introduce ideas, priorities and expectations that aren’t truly yours. And that can lead to confusion, changing expectations and unnecessary impacts on time and budget.
- Upload our plans for AI to critique or redesign: There are a lot of considerations behind every design decision, from your brief and budget to site constraints and the many conversations we’ve had along the way. AI doesn’t have that full picture. It can keep suggesting alternatives without understanding why particular decisions were made, leading to more questions, shifting goalposts and less confidence in the process.
- Generate alternative architectural renders: Uploading our 3D views to AI to redesign spaces, change architectural elements or create new design directions can produce some pretty convincing images. The trouble is, they don’t necessarily reflect what’s buildable, affordable or appropriate for your project.
- Send us AI-generated design alternatives: If you do explore alternative designs using AI, we ask that you do not send us the resulting images or plans. Instead, tell us what you’re trying to achieve, what isn’t quite working or what caught your eye. We’d much rather hear your thinking in your own words so we can work through it together.
Why we’re writing this policy
We’re not against AI. But we do have concerns about how it can affect the design process.
There are important questions around intellectual property, authorship and protecting the creative work of our team. But perhaps our biggest concern is the trust between us and our clients.
Good design comes from weighing up your brief, your site, your budget and hundreds of decisions along the way. When those decisions are continually questioned or reworked through AI without the full context, it can muddy the waters, shift the goalposts and undermine confidence in the process.
We also believe there’s something pretty special about human creativity and original thinking. Our team puts a huge amount of care, experience and creative energy into every project, and that personal investment is a big part of what makes our work meaningful.
Ultimately, we want to protect the trust, respect and collaboration that make great homes (and great working relationships) possible.
Our commitment to you
We’re always looking at ways to improve how we work, both behind the scenes and in how we communicate with you.
We’ll continue to explore tools that make our processes clearer, more efficient and easier for you to navigate, without losing the personal thinking and care that goes into your project.
And please, keep asking questions, challenging ideas and sharing your thoughts with us. We genuinely love it when our clients get involved. Those conversations, the back and forth, the unexpected ideas and the moments when everything clicks, are some of the best parts of what we do. We only ask that those conversations happen between people, not through a machine.
