Artificial Intelligence as a pedagogical tool for architectural education: What does the empirical evidence tell us?

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in arts and design have been growing in popularity in recent years. Numerous AI program applications are publicly available, both commercial and open source, offering a chance to convert the textual description of a design or context into original content images. While many research projects tackled AI use in architecture since 2015, there seems to be a lack of empirical evidence of its use in Architecture education as a tool for concept generation. An experimental architecture design course took place in Fall 2022 where 34 students utilised AI programs in the conceptual design phase to produce original content images from narratives to help students generate concepts for their buildings. The designs of the experimental student groups are compared to another control group of 50 students which use more traditional conceptual design methods on a similar project in the same semester. This paper aims to highlight the opportunities and challenges of using AI tools in the concept generation phase in architecture design education by measuring their effectiveness to increase creativity in form finding. With the use of recent literature in architecture learning theories and pedagogies, this experimental approach will be critiqued to provide further insights into AI’s role in architecture education.