What’s the Deal with AI Furniture Design?

If you didn’t already know, artificial intelligence (AI) has entered the world of furniture design. Using a variety of easily accessible online tools, you can now have AI create a design for a furniture piece based on the description you provide.

So, is this how all furniture will be designed from now on? As of right now, AI furniture design is fairly limited.

Admittedly, AI furniture design tools are fun to play around with. You put in a prompt and the AI tool will generate a concept (or multiple concepts), which you can then further modify. At first glance, the results can be cool looking, although sometimes the results are downright odd! But in all of the instances that we’ve encountered, the designs are completely unbuildable as presented. For example, the AI-generated design will show two surfaces interacting, but when you look more closely, they don’t actually touch. Or, the image will have a surface that is completely unsupported. In one instance, the AI tool gave us schematics for a furniture piece, and had we followed them, the piece would have been completely nonfunctional.

AI doesn’t seem to take ergonomics into account either. Instead, it appears to be only concerned with aesthetics, making AI pretty limited when it comes to designing furniture.

This isn’t to say that AI furniture design tools don’t have any value. If you want to play around with these tools, we would suggest using them like you would use a brainstorming exercise at work. In a brainstorming session, you typically just throw any ideas up on a whiteboard. They don’t have to be good ideas. They can be crazy, unrealistic, or even nonsensical. A brainstorming exercise is designed to get the creative juices flowing, and sometimes, something good eventually comes out of it. You can use AI furniture design tools in much the same way. Let AI generate all kinds of wild ideas—most of which would never work in the real world—and use one or two of them as a starting point for what could turn into an interesting design concept.

If you present us with a concept that was produced by AI and ask us to build it, that’s totally fine! You just need to understand that we will likely need to make some modifications. We will do our best to stay as close as possible to the design you love, but the concept likely won’t be buildable as is.

It should also be noted that AI doesn’t come up with any new ideas. Anything AI generates is based on existing designs that it finds online (although it may combine multiple design elements in a new way).

AI is fascinating technology, no doubt! But it still has some real limitations when it is used for designing furniture. No matter which AI tool you use, you’re still going to need to work with an experienced furniture designer and builder if you want to end up with a functional piece.

Here at Smith Farms, we’d love to help! Contact us to start a conversation about a custom furniture piece you would like to have built for your home or office.