Creative Director Rebecca Kelly shares her perspective on AI as part of Material Source’s ‘40 Views on AI from Built Environment Professionals.’

‘40 Views on AI’ Material Source invites Rebecca Kelly to key industry discussion.

Material Source is a platform for the built environment, connecting people, products and ideas across architecture, interiors and design. Through its editorial content, seminars and roundtables, it seeks to stimulate thought leadership and open discussion around the issues shaping the industry.

40 Views on AI builds on an earlier exploration of what AI actually is, returning a year later to ask a more consequential question, how is AI changing the way the built environment works, thinks and designs?

Rather than seeking a definitive answer, the article deliberately creates a collective snapshot of opinion. Across the 40 contributions, a number of consistent themes emerge. AI is broadly understood as a tool, increasingly embedded within professional practice, with the potential to remove repetitive and administrative tasks, accelerate analysis and exploration, and create more time for creativity. Yet this optimism is repeatedly balanced by concerns around authorship, originality, homogenisation, accountability and the erosion of professional expertise.

Perhaps the most significant recurring theme is the distinction between efficiency and value. AI can accelerate production, but speed does not necessarily produce better design. Human judgement, intuition, empathy, collaboration, lived experience and critical thinking remain central to creating meaningful places. There is also a particular concern for the next generation, with experience and learning through practice seen as essential qualities that cannot simply be generated by technology.

Rebecca Kelly, Creative Director, places these tensions within the longer evolution of design technology. Her contribution describes AI as an accelerated evolution, connecting it to the progression from drawing boards and Rotring pens through CAD and visualisation. Her distinctive contribution is to shift the discussion beyond productivity towards the intellectual implications of instantaneous generation, asking how creativity, originality and judgement are redefined when possibility expands at unprecedented speed. Ultimately, she reinforces the article’s central proposition, technology may reshape the process, but human insight, critical thinking and intent must continue to direct it.

Read the full article in Material Source