MODELLING INTERIOR YACHT DESIGN CONCEPTS CROSSING MULTIPLE AI TOOLS: TEACHING IN AN UNCERTAIN AND FLEXIBLE FRAMEWORK
Year: 2024
Editor: Grierson, Hilary; Bohemia, Erik; Buck, Lyndon
Author: Bionda, Arianna; Incitti, Gildo
Series: E&PDE
Institution: Politecnico di Milano, Italy; POLO Platform, Belgium
Page(s): 181 - 186
DOI number: 10.35199/EPDE.2024.31
ISBN: 978-1-912254-200
ISSN: 3005-4753
Abstract
Yacht design is a multidisciplinary sector where skills from design, architecture and engineering education are applied. The students involved in this field need to coordinate highly diversified areas of competence: design, architecture, ergonomics, and materials, with their respective specialized disciplinary articulations. The rise of AI tools for design modelling and sketching rapidly evolves the role of exterior and interior yacht designers in early-stage concept creation, opening debates within the professional context. The application of AI sketching in the yacht design industry is nowadays moving from inspiration tools to design creators, disrupting not only the daily designer's work but also the way curricular training offers are thought. Within the framework of the Executive Interior Yacht Design specialization course at the Politecnico di Milano, an instructional module focused on Advanced Drawing Skills was introduced to a cohort of students. This module was properly designed to guide students through an educational trajectory with a twofold aim: to provide future professionals skills for mastering AI technologies for yacht interior concepts and to support the development of capabilities to adapt to - and innovate in - a flexible framework. This paper presents the course pilot case through its intended learning outcomes, methods, didactic tools, and learning exercises, evaluating the students activities results from the lecturers and participants perspectives. Furthermore, it assesses the whole learning experience through a dedicated survey. As results, the outcomes of the design activities and the learning survey are presented and discussed on three different levels: (i) output image quality (content adherence, variation, style, interference), (ii) student-AI interaction, and (iii) learning environment. The study demonstrates the efficacy of education with and for AI in the context of the professional course in executive interior yacht design as an opportunity to provide students with methodologies and tools for concept design creation. Moreover, given the dynamic landscape of evolving generative models and platforms, the research points out how this course pilot case shifted the yacht design learning approach from applying knowledge to experiment practices. At last, the training challenges students in design with a high level of uncertainty and flexibility, emphasizing adaptability and resilience for the future yacht design career.
Keywords: Yacht design, Interior design, Artificial Intelligence, AI teaching and learning, Image generation