DE S IGN CENTRE


several design teams. The brief was an outlandish punk take on Shakespeare’s London so all the images each team had collated were pulled through an AI generator to unify them. It made everything look like Harry Potter World – which was exactly what we didn’t want,” recalls architect and self-labelled AI sceptic Ben Allen, who was a panellist on ELLE Decoration’s talk on why design matters at London Design Week 2026. “There is potential with image generation, but it’s hard not to make it look like everything else.” Kelly Wearstler, an AI advocate who recently launched the Mesa collection


of outdoor fabrics with Lee Jofa, reportedly uses Sora, an AI program that transforms text and images into immersive videos. She believes that the result of integrating AI is making her studio more human, not less. “It’s sped up our industrial design process, it’s made our presentations to clients more dynamic and convincing, it’s made project teams crazy efficient and has all but eliminated miscommunications,” she wrote on her Wearstlerworld Substack. “All in the service of the studio spending time on what matters: adding the layer of human emotion, understanding of materiality, and in giving us back the time to experience the world and its beauty in order to direct, edit, curate, and compose amazing design work.” It’s a view shared by multidisciplinary designer Tola Ojuolape, whose recent


projects include the Collectors’ Lounge for the 2026 Collect Art Fair, and who names Lelièvre Paris as one of her favourite Design Centre showrooms. She can see both the pitfalls and potentials of AI: “It can never replace us, but it can expedite some processes. We use SketchUp when we want to see what a space looks like at a certain time of day or in a certain light. As AI keeps developing, I’m excited to see what the possibilities are once you’ve created a design and how it can aid storytelling quicker.” She says that her main concern is that AI does its learning from algorithms,


so it may only look to an echo chamber of other design schemes for inspiration, and not the myriad of other influences that might go into a project, from history to art and architecture. “Also, materiality is such a big part of interiors and AI is not developed enough to be able be able to adapt to that,” she continues. “Every project we work on is unique, so we are the opposite of AI – tactile and human in our approach.” It seems then, that while AI can boost efficiency, it’s no substitute for the empathy and originality needed to create nuanced and meaningful interiors.


CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Lee Jofaʼs Mesa collection, designed by Kelly Wearstler – the designer recently wrote about how AI is freeing up more time for the human touch;


Tre Dita, a Chicago restaurant by David Collins Studio, a practice that is embracing AI to create more personalised and responsive hospitality schemes; a project by Tola Ojuolape, a designer who, like Wearstler, sees the benefits in using AI to boost efficiency, while remaining more sceptical about its abilities to create truly nuanced interiors


- 62-


© Eric Wolfinger


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72