The US architect, designer and scholar is set to draw from his own research and practice to illustrate how emerging AI technologies are already reshaping design.

According to Joshua Vermillion, the current discourse surrounding artificial intelligence runs along a continuum between two extremes.

“At one end is, I think, some folks who are very contrarian, almost to a fault,” he says. “They’ll never be convinced.” 

At the opposite end, he says, are the ‘tech bros’. “They’re the hype machine trying to raise the next billion or trillion dollars to train the next model. They overpromise. They are loud, obnoxious and they’re just trying to sell you.” 

Somewhere in between, researchers like Vermillion are trying to provide a signal to the architecture and design world that can be heard above the swelling crescendo of opinion, prediction, competition, promise and despair. 

“To me, I think that’s the responsibility that we have as scholars, and those in academia, to provide context and cut through the noise,” Vermillion says.

Design in the age of AI

Vermillion is coming to Sydney for the first time to deliver a keynote for Vivid Minds – the new talks and ideas component of Vivid Sydney. Taking place at the State Library of New South Wales on Saturday 30 May, ‘Creative Machines: Rethinking Design in the Age of AI’ will be informed by his work at the nexus of architecture, computational design, research and education. 

It’s set to be a visually rich journey through the growing role of robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning in architecture and design, as Vermillion explores contemporary experimental projects, speculative design research and real-world examples. From algorithmic design systems to robotic fabrication and AI-driven workflows, designers can learn how to engage critically and creatively with intelligent technologies – and how these tools are opening new possibilities for innovation, ethics and expression.

“I’m not an apologist,” he says. “I’m going to talk pretty flatly about just using tools and I’ll talk a little bit about some of the things I’ve done in the past and and then what I’m working on currently.”

‘Running to where the ball’s going’

At present, Vermillion works as an associate professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Nevada, where he also coordinates the at-LAS Lab, a transdisciplinary design-research group merging technology, industry-informed research and development, and community engagement. 

As an educator, Vermillion wants to ensure his students enter the workforce prepared. “To use a football metaphor, not just running to the ball, but running to where the ball’s going,” he says. 

As a researcher and designer, Vermillion constantly uses generative AI tools to understand their affordances, limits and their biases. This often bleeds into his own creative practice, which he says has “never been busier”, primarily taken up by visualisation, video and narrative commissions for Harper’s Bazaar, Elle magazine, Samsung, Jaguar, Land Rover, Microsoft and Sony Music.

Vermillion is also tapped into contemporary business needs, delivering workshops to architects and other design professionals. “Everybody’s asking the same questions: ‘What does this mean?’ ‘Am I behind?'” he says. “I think a lot of folks are in a wait-and-see mode and that’s understandable, but by and large as professional organisations survey their constituents, like in architecture, more and more are using these AI tools.” 

As the building industry incrementally absorbs new AI technologies, it’s also trying to manage risk, he says. “We see new and unproven as risky,” he says. “And when human safety and oftentimes millions, sometimes even billions, of dollars are on the line, I think as an industry as a whole, we’re risk averse.”

It’s this same risk aversion that he believes is safeguarding the outright replacement of architects by AI software.

“I don’t know of any licensing body that would want to give a professional architecture licence to an algorithm,” he says. “And on the flip side of that coin, I don’t know of any tech company that wants to assume the risk and liability of stamping a set of drawings and being responsible for the health, safety and wellbeing of anybody in the public that comes in contact with the building that was designed.”

As he readies that future workforce, he tells his students to “lean into things that can’t be offloaded to a computer”.

“A computer can out-execute us in certain things, but it can’t outdecide us. It can’t weigh decisions across cultural understandings in norms, across an ethical system of values and morals,” he says. “Design is a very complex undertaking that also requires empathy, understanding, really close listening, working with others and critical thinking, and those are not a machine’s wheelhouse, those are human responsibilities. If we lean into those, I think we’re just fine.”

First contact with a new kind of intelligence

Vermillion is no AI apologist, but he does consider himself a relative optimist – sitting somewhere close to the middle of the continuum. He wants attendees of his Vivid Sydney keynote to leave feeling as if it’s a really interesting time to be alive.

“In the next decade or so, if we continue to put our human resources [and] money resources into these technologies, we probably will at some point achieve something most people would agree is a non-biological intelligence,” he says. “If that’s the case, then it’s like first contact, right?” 

He’s also hopeful that the augmentation provided by technology should give architects more time to focus on the crucial task of redesigning the world and solving existential problems like global warming and urbanisation.

“There may be a near future where we actually have more time to sit at that table and help shape things at a higher level than just the project brief that we signed on with the client,” he says.

Event details and tickets

‘Creative Machines: Rethinking Design in the Age of AI‘, featuring Joshua Vermillion, will take place at the State Library of New South Wales on Saturday 30 May. Buy tickets here.

Lead image: Fluid Geometries of Paint, an AI-generated spatial imaginary created by Joshua Vermillion.