KILN - Design & Visualisation

Thoughts

Case Study: Ocean Pavilion
Case Study: Ocean Pavilion

Kiln collaborated closely on this project for a client looking to raise investment for a project that explored a modular approach to marine tourism. The ambition is to encourage more people to experience underwater marine environments by providing resilient structures in different oceans around the world. These structures are designed to be modular and explore a blended brief of marine research and eco-tourism.

Our role was to help the client bring this to life through design, modelling and visualisation. We tested different aesthetic designs and explored how this might be marketed in different environments. The process was highly iterative and ran for a long period of time as the concept was refined and evolved.

Iterative testing renders show some of the output during the process.

Oliver Hessian
Process - Furniture Modelling
Process - Furniture Modelling

It’s easy to take the tools and processes involved in producing visualisations for granted when you’ve been embedded in the field for so long. I am always intrigued to know what the day-to-day looks like for my friends and relatives beyond just the job title or end product. I’m creating videos explaining parts of the process in response to being asked myself. In this first video, sped up 15X, you'll see what goes on behind the scenes and discover that some methods are still relatively "manual."

Oliver Hessian
A.I. & Design
A.I. & Design

Introduction

Recently, I have been fascinated to witness the proliferation and experimentation with image-from-text services driven by AI technology. After so many years of feeling secure that our creative talents were one of the few realms of human ability that would remain beyond the reach of machine learning, the output from platforms like Midjourney and Dall-E can feel quite confronting.

For the uninitiated, these platforms generate unique images from a series of written prompts that describe what the user is trying to accomplish. By simply typing what you want to see, the interface generates a series of images as options. You then select what you want to progress and can refine the output until you’re satisfied with the image or set of images. 

What does this mean?

The ability to generate striking and emotive imagery shows a fascinating replication of composition, light balance and colour theory produced without human intervention. Themes that can take years to master for an artist can now be bypassed with intelligent prompt inputs, where creative input shifts from production to curation.

Suddenly, everyone can have access to the ability to create captivating imagery with the input of a few words. So, how does this disruptive technology impact designers and creative professionals, and what role can it play in the design process?

I trained as an architect and when I graduated, was fortunate enough to do what I loved, designing a broad range of buildings and spaces with a large degree of creative freedom. It’s worth noting that this is not common in our industry. Architecture is a profoundly misunderstood profession and demands much more than just design. I was lucky because I had acquired a set of skills that allows me to explore my ideas and communicate them persuasively and then landed in an environment where this was encouraged. 

My focus for the last several years has been working with other architects and designers to explore, understand and communicate the potential of their ideas using the skills I had developed to express my own. So I approach this new technology from the perspective of a designer, communicator and artist. 

I believe that the methods we use to communicate and develop our ideas play an important role in the quality of the outcomes. A rough sketch is still sometimes the best tool to communicate an idea, even when we have access to photorealistic renderings or virtual reality. The appropriate method of exploration or communication is linked to resolution and imagination. The lower the resolution, the higher demand is on imagination to understand the intention. Finding the balance between these is a skill, but you also need to have the option to choose. 

Jochen Weißenberger - School of Jelly

Benefits

To varying degrees, every design process has creative and pragmatic stages. This is more true with projects that require translation to functional reality than purely digital or artistic projects, but they all require ideas at some point. It is in the most creative stages of the design process that this technology has the most potential benefit. 

Ideation is normally the very start and the most creative stage; it is about throwing ideas out there and discarding most of them. Many designers refer to their process as iterative, which draws an interesting parallel to how users interact with prompt-based image generation. Design is a process of continual refinement; any process that helps generate more thought-provoking ideas in these stages certainly helps.

These new tools have the potential to be an excellent cure for the blank page. Any designer will be familiar with the equivalent of writer's block. Architects are trained to switch mediums or perspectives to help escape these ruts. Whether it is drawing in section rather than plan or creating physical models instead of drawing by hand, understanding what our options are and acquiring more makes us better designers. The more modes of exploration we give ourselves, the better we can understand the problem we're trying to solve.

This is where I see these platforms being powerful: as alternate tools for producing novel expressions based on fuzzy notions or moods. Inspiration can come from much stranger places than artificially generated imagery. Inspiration can strike or be desperately sought at every stage of the design process. Sometimes just seeing something outside of the tunnel vision that can develop is all that is needed.

There are, of course, many applications outside the design profession. The African Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai_Ai) generate images to highlight and explore the inherent bias in machine learning systems so that these can be discussed and bypassed. With relatively minimal input, they can generate provocative imagery that prompts discussion and reaction in a community that aims to ensure that any creative representation doesn’t simply perpetuate stereotypes. This highlights one of the main risks of machine learning and also calls into question the accuracy of Artificial Intelligence as the latest buzzword. There are many examples of these biases in other systems and text-to-image generation is no exception.

Challenges

However, opportunity rarely comes without risk, and these services could easily be mistaken for something they’re not and represent a potential pitfall for young designers. Lured by the promise of beguiling imagery, I imagine architecture students spending hours inputting prompts and waiting for the images they hope will come but may not. If they do, how do they explain the thinking that led them there? Or worse, how will they transform this into reality?

This touches on another issue: using these images at the wrong project stage. Expectations are placed on architectural visualisations to capture the feeling of being in a place while accurately depicting the reality of what will be built. There has been serious debate around the manipulation of truth through visualisations to misconstrue how a project will appear upon completion. What happens when the process of communication is completely detached from the design? Reverse engineering art, although not impossible, is a path normally reserved for the pioneers.

Conclusion

AI has the potential to help jog us out of our normal patterns of thinking by asking something rather than somebody else what they think. With the responses being so beautiful, it’s easy to believe this input will inspire designers to greater heights of imagination.

The challenge will always be in translating imagination into reality, but that is what great design is.









Oliver HessianAI, design, process, Industry Insights
Business Update
Business Update

Many of us have experienced significant change over the last few years due to global events outside of anyone’s control, we’ve all had to adapt, review and reflect on how we conduct business.  We had already entered a transition period prior to the emergence of Covid in the world.

Thankfully, this transition was due to happier reasons than a global pandemic, primarily to move closer to family and support my partner in pursuing a dream opportunity in Boston, Massachusetts. This was followed more recently with a return to Bath in the UK and the opportunity to put down both personal and professional roots close to my family.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that our connections to each other are incredibly important and that relationships can be created and sustained despite any geographical boundary.  Our business has always been global, operating from various countries and collaborating or partnering with organisations and individuals around the world.  As we enter this new phase with a rebrand to KILN in the UK, I look forward to continuing to be part of a global community as reflected by our recent projects in London, Sydney, New York, Los Angeles, Saudi Arabia, China, France and Kenya.

Hessian Design

Hessian Design was established in Sydney in 2017 and provided design consulting and architectural visualisation services to architects, interior designers and developers. We have worked on many incredible projects and with fantastic clients across a huge spectrum of building typologies.

I worked as a design architect for several years before establishing Hessian Design and have always maintained every intention of working on design projects alongside providing visualisation services. It is not always easy, and I’m sometimes acutely aware of the cost of not focusing on one or the other, but I have been fortunate enough to work as a designer on several projects over the years in Sydney, including several competitions with my old team at Grimshaw Sydney, and I love it.

K I L N

KILN was established in Boston in 2019 as a result of my partner being offered an incredible opportunity to pursue her dream of a PhD at MIT. We are both from Europe, so had been looking to move closer to our families already. One of the benefits of visualisation work is that it is predominantly remote in nature which has enabled me to continue working with Australian clients. I also established new client relationships in New York, Los Angeles and London. Despite the global turmoil around Covid 19, and a prolonged personal displacement, I feel very fortunate to have worked with some more incredible people on great projects in the US.

New York projects with Michaelis Boyd

I have continued to work on some fantastic design projects while in Boston. A house extension and complete renovation in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, where we handed over to local architect Appleton Partners for documentation and site supervision. We worked alongside Studio Lyon Szot on a complete gut renovation of a terrace house in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. Both projects have the additional bonus of allowing me to collaborate with my siblings Scarlett and India at Studio Hessian, who have continued to deliver the interior design and fit-out.

Next

The most recent move finds me back home in the UK, based in Bath with another new business entity and a technology startup on the side. My focus has been on consolidating the businesses and improving our internal systems, and IT structure which has resulted in the decision to close Hessian Design in Australia, KILN LLC in the US will go dormant while we run all of our accounts from the UK.

We’re preparing to move into an office space in Bath alongside another family venture Hessian Collective which will be a vintage furniture and homewares store in the Margaret Buildings, nestled between the Circus and Royal Crescent of Bath. We have some great long-standing clients in the UK already but hope to establish new relationships in the UK and Europe in the coming year. We intend to stay still for the immediate future, so we hope to focus on growing a small team in Bath and engaging with the local design community.

If you have any questions or just want to say hello, please do get in touch we would love to hear from you.

contact@kiln-studio.com








Oliver Hessian