Designing smart home interiors can be challenging and time-consuming. Even more so than in a conventional home, these interiors must be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing, and what each side looks like can vary between clients. Artificial intelligence (AI) provides a solution.
AI is more widespread than you may realize and several off-the-shelf AI-powered design tools are already available. These tools can automate parts of the design process and provide new insight, helping you make the most of your time and resources.
Seeing How Designs Fit in Existing Spaces
AI helps improve smart home interior design by visualizing designs in real space. AI can render photos of smart home gadgets and furniture as virtual 3D models. Augmented reality (AR) apps can then display these renderings over a real-time view of a room.
There are several AR interior design apps today that render these AI-generated models on top of photos or live videos of a given space. With these tools, you can effectively pose items around an existing room without having them in your physical possession. Because AI makes them true to scale, color and lighting, you can preview how various objects fit with the rest of the interior in size and appearance.
Visualizing smart home designs without physically moving anything makes the design process much faster. Switching between virtual models is quicker than moving physical objects, and you don’t need to buy anything and wait for it to arrive to see if it works in a space.
Streamlining the Design Process for New Spaces
Interior designers and integrators must also design new spaces — not just adjust existing ones — and AI can help in this area, too. AI-powered apps like Planner 5D or more complex, enterprise-targeting building information modeling (BIM) platforms can generate virtual models of rooms and homes themselves, not just their furniture.
These digital models let you visualize designs for new, undecorated or under-construction spaces. Some programs include AI algorithms that suggest items given the room’s physical dimensions, the project budget and customers’ general tastes. By capitalizing on these tools, you can get a baseline for a smart home’s interior design before a complete physical space even exists, streamlining the process.
Virtual design tools also enable remote work in an industry where that isn’t always possible. These more flexible working environments can be more productive — hence their continued strong growth in recent years — so taking advantage of them can further streamline the design process.
Enabling Continuous Improvement
AI can aid the smart home design process outside of generating 3D models, too. Intelligent algorithms can also analyze data from your workflows and customer feedback to identify areas where you could improve.
Integrators and designers often face challenging customer requests, so it can be difficult to see repeating patterns or trends in their responses. AI can parse feedback for common themes and highlight them so you know if there’s a consistent issue you should keep in mind in future projects.
Similarly, some AI tools can review your workflows to see if there are any inefficiencies. They can then automate some areas or suggest changes to help you avoid bottlenecks and work more efficiently. As you make these adjustments over time, your businesses will become more cost-efficient and customer satisfaction will rise.
Considerations for Using AI
These many benefits of AI in smart home design are exciting, but it’s essential to approach the field carefully. Despite these advantages, this technology has some drawbacks, too. Interior designers and integrators should know about these challenges to use AI more effectively.
One of the biggest obstacles is AI’s need for information. These tools need vast amounts of clean data to work properly, so a lack of data is one of the most common barriers to AI adoption. That’s not always an issue with ready-made AI apps that already have the details they need, but if you’re using a more complex system, you’ll need extensive data for them to be reliable.
Collecting that information can cause concerns, too, especially if you’re gathering customer data, which you’d need for review analysis. Holding all that information could make you a target for cybercrime and data breaches cost $9.44 million on average. Depending on your location, you may have to meet government regulations about what details you keep and how you can store them.
Before diving into AI investment, consider these issues. Review your data availability, security measures and applicable data laws to ensure you can use these tools effectively and safely.
AI Can Revolutionize Smart Home Interior Design
Humans should always have the final say in any decision, but AI can accelerate and improve many decision-making processes. These tools can help you design smart home interiors faster, more effectively and with lower costs. While some challenges remain, the potential is vast.
As AI becomes more common and accessible, it may change how smart home integrators and interior designers approach their jobs forever. Starting to work with the technology today could prepare you for that future.
