Years ago, a man called to ask whether I could design his new house after a fire. He had already chosen a very good and reputable contractor, and he JUST needed someone to design it (WHAT!!!). Then he told me he didn’t need a fancy house, JUST a house, and since the design wouldn’t take me long (his words), I could simply let him know my fee.
I wrote about that call in Why design is not valued, but the execution is, and my annoyance is easy to see in the post, since the fifteen minutes on the phone were minutes I could have spent on the seventh design idea(?) for another project. Ok, that is for another post.
Thinking about that time, I think he was ahead of his time.
Today he would probably skip the fee question and arrive with a few images he generated himself, asking me to make them real. In the old post I blamed Home Depot’s “You can do it, we can help” slogan and the renovation shows, and that explanation still holds, though it no longer covers everything.
Design and the drawings behind it are now valued less than before, and the cause is not about AI but how clients judge our work through how much effort went into it.
Feeling like a designer vs Believing to be one
I used to shout at those renovation shows, where a wrecked house turned into magazine-ready photos in thirty minutes (I am still waiting for the condo version).
Everyone watching knew it was a tv show, but it still left them confident enough to have strong opinions about tile and paint.
Those opinions did not matter much, because someone still had to turn them into drawings, and that step was where we(architects, designers) were protected.
With AI, people no longer stop at the opinion, since they can type a description and hold a realistic picture of the house a minute later, which is why believing you can design is a bigger problem for us than feeling like a designer ever was.
Effort was doing the selling
For years, a thick set of drawings did a lot of the selling for us, architects.
Typically clients could not tell whether a staircase was well proportioned or whether the plan suited the site, but they could hold dozens of sheets and see that someone had spent weeks on them, so our fee conversations were really about effort.
I will admit I was happy to leave them there, because effort is much easier to explain than judgment.
Now a person can describe a house and receive a realistic image of it in the time it takes to make coffee, with a lawn and nice afternoon light included.
The staircase may lead nowhere and the house may have no chance of passing a building inspection, but the picture looks finished, and a finished look was what effort used to show clients.
When the image is easy, the client assumes the design is also easy, and the drawings that follow begin to look like paperwork.
That is how both lose value at the same time: the design because anyone seems able to produce it, and the drawings because nobody can see the labour in them anymore.
The part nobody can see
What I was explaining (to clients) all along was never the drawings themselves (effort), but knowing which of those attractive images could be the leak, fail inspection or cost twice the budget. (knowledge).
Expertise are only needed when there are problems, and when they appear, they come with negative financial consequences: project budget (and time) increase.
How do you charge for a problem that never happened because somebody caught it early?
I haven’t found a good way, and I have cut my own fee to win a job more than once (guilty, as I admitted in the old post), which probably didn’t help the case.
The man on the phone learned about the invisible part the hard way, since his house had not been built to code and the city told him only after the fire.
I suggested he look for another architect, and I like to think he found one, though these days he could just as easily have an AI picture of a house with a very nice lawn and no staircase to speak of.
