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 beengrowing in popularity in recent years. Numerous AI program applications arepublicly available, both commercial and open source, offering a chance to convertthe textual description of a design or context into original content images. Whilemany research projects tackled AI use in architecture since 2015, there seems to bea lack of empirical evidence of its use in Architecture education as a tool for conceptgeneration. An experimental architecture design course took place in Fall 2022where 34 students utilised AI programs in the conceptual design phase to produceoriginal content images from narratives to help students generate concepts for theirbuildings. The designs of the experimental student groups are compared to anothercontrol group of 50 students which use more traditional conceptual design methodson a similar project in the same semester. This paper aims to highlight theopportunities and challenges of using AI tools in the concept generation phase inarchitecture design education by measuring their effectiveness to increase creativityin form finding. With the use of recent literature in architecture learning theoriesand pedagogies, this experimental approach will be critiqued to provide furtherinsights into AI’s role in architecture education.