The Power of AI in Interior Design
This podcast is originally from Sherwin-Williams published February 25, 2025.
Emerging developments in the realm of artificial intelligence offer endless advantages to those willing to adopt—and adapt to—the tools on this cresting wave of the future. On the latest episode of Colormixology™, host Sue Wadden invites two trailblazers in the world of AI and design to share their expertise and enthusiasm for all the ways that new technologies can enhance design, as long as professionals use them thoughtfully, properly, and to propel their processes and expand on their talents and expertise.
Sue met with Vocon’s Senior Associate, Technology Director, Brandon Dorsey, who discussed how integral artificial-intelligence tools are becoming to deliver faster, better results in architecture, design, and building information modeling (BIM), how essential the human presence still remains, and how helpful AI can be for designers if they approach new technologies with curiosity, creativity, and a willingness to explore and evolve the ways they work.
The transcript from the podcast is shown below or listen to it here.
Sue:
Before we talk to our next guest, we’d like to take a moment to congratulate our February designer of the month, Melissa Roberts. Melissa’s work will be featured on our Sherwin-Williams Design Pro Social in February of 2025, but you can also check out her beautiful work at melissarobertsinteriors.com and @melissarobertsinteriors on Instagram. Now we welcome to the show Brandon Dorsey, a Technology Director at design and architecture firm, Vocon, which has an office here in Cleveland. So welcome, Brandon. We’re excited to have you on Colormixology.
Brandon:
Thanks, Sue. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Sue:
Vocon is an amazing design firm, which we’ve had the privilege to work on on a large project with Sherwin-Williams. But tell me about your role because it sounds very fancy, the technology director.
Brandon:
Yeah, no problems.
Sue:
So what does that mean exactly?
Brandon:
So I get the privilege of researching all new technology that is impacting the AEC community and how we serve our clients. So you can imagine the vast amount of technology that’s coming to market right now. I have a team that I work with that goes out, looks at those technologies that are coming and evaluates how those are going to impact design and how we can start to augment our design process and deliver better projects for our clients.
Sue:
That is fascinating, especially because we’re going dip into AI and its impact. But how long have you been doing this? Have you been at Vocon for a bit?
Brandon:
Yes, I’ve been with Vocon for going on 12 years now. Went to Kent State. I’ve been in the industry over 20 years. I actually went for interior design and architecture, but just always had a passion for technology. So that’s where my career took me.
Sue:
So how has tech impacted pre-AI? Did you see the arc? What did that look like? For those that aren’t familiar.
Brandon:
It all goes back to starting with early days, working with hand drawings, going into CAD, and then a software called Revit, which is BIM technology, so building information modeling, to start to build a model in 3D and be able to use that model to understand how designs coming together. And then you have started to see technology applications that hooked onto that, which allowed us to do real-time rendering and actually start to visualize that model for our clients. With that, we are able to now start to understand early in the design process how our projects would come together and we were able to leverage that to make better design decisions.
So the arc is interesting because it started slow, but it’s exponentially been growing, especially with what we’re about to talk about with AI. We’re seeing a boom in technology within the AEC community and how we’re starting to use these different technology platforms to expedite the project deadlines and come up with iterations and design decisions faster. So you can imagine what used to take a designer a week or two to up with different design options for the client to choose from. We’re now able to iterate faster and come up with better solutions with more information at our exposure.
Sue:
I think that is the thread we really want to pull on is that these AI technology or this technology is not taking designers jobs. It’s really about speed and acceleration. And that’s really exciting, allowing designers to be more creative, to do the business of design in a more impactful way and the technology can take over and just make it speedier to market. So that’s what I’m really excited about. But tell us your take on Vocon’s position on AI now in design.
Brandon:
Yeah, so actually if you rewind about three years ago, as part of my research, we started to see this coming, right? So there’s a book called the Coming Wave that I was reading by an author named Mustafa who talks about this wave of technology and one of them was AI. So back then I started to look at how we’re going to leverage AI and really starting to figure out what does it take to bring AI into the workforce within Vocon in particular. So we developed an AI task force, which comprised of several people within the office, both Cleveland and New York office, designers, technical management, and actually office services and overhead, meaning our finance team, our HR team, because we wanted to get a full spectrum of how AI could impact the business. In doing so, that task force was then launched and we were assigned different aspects to explore.
So if you can imagine the design team in the AI task force was tasked with exploring how can AI impact design. So you talk about generative design, where are tools coming to market that are going to impact how design comes together? If you talk about technical: where are tools in AI going to help leverage the technical aspect of how details come together, for example? Management, is there AI solutions out there that are going to help to augment the process of how we manage projects, how we assign team members to projects. And then overhead, HR, finance, are there technologies out there that are going to help just in the overall process of how we conduct business even within our marketing team? So you can imagine some of these tools are going to sound familiar to some of the people on the podcast today because they’re now being used within organizations throughout the world.
So when you talk about ChatGPT, you talk about Grammarly, for example. Just simple tools like that that are helping to augment the process of how we used to do our jobs are now at our fingertips and it’s helping us immensely because we’re actively being able to be more productive and efficient with how we’re doing our work. Not to mention other softwares that are natively being integrated into the applications that we use. So we’re an Office 365 house and we use Microsoft with has copilot, right? Whether you’re Google or Microsoft, it doesn’t matter. These enterprise solutions are starting to embed AI within their own software that you are using today. So that’s how we’re starting to use that.
Sue:
So many questions. We have an internal task force as well at Sherman Williams doing the same thing and evaluating the constant need of this. But I think what’s overwhelming, I sit on that task force too, that’s why I’m so passionate about it. But there’s so many tools now and evaluating which are the right ones because they’re exploding onto the marketplace. So you have to constantly audit what’s coming to decide if this is right for your business. So I think at the end I’m going to ask for smaller firms that don’t have such a large staff to go after this technology. We’ll ask about resources or any recommendations on where people can find more information. But do you think it’s fair to say that AI is going to become essential to the work that Vocon does and the designers do
Brandon:
It already is, not is it going to, it is today. We’re leveraging AI on various projects to help, like I said, expedite and augment the process. It’s one thing I talk about in the office is do not fear AI taking over your job. Instead, embrace it because you’re going to start to leverage this even though you don’t think you are today, you actually are in the tools that you’re using. It’s happening behind the scenes. So the more you can start to embrace it and recognize it and learn how these tools work, the better off you’ll be. So to answer your question, we are leveraging it today.
Sue:
And even in really familiar software like Photoshop, there’s already AI tech behind the scenes. That’s awesome. And those little edits are making even your day-to-day Photoshop work so much easier. So again, I’m a fan and I love this conversation.
Brandon:
Yeah, so to that point, I just wanted to add one thing because that’s an interesting software. Obviously we use Adobe Photoshop, all Adobe products, but what is done for the process of what used to take an hour or two on a rendering, to modify that rendering using Photoshop, using generative fill and AI on Photoshop is amazing because-
Sue:
It’s awesome.
Brandon:
…. We can replace the sky, for example, in the background, and that used to, well that was a daunting task. So it’s just helped immensely.
Sue:
And in my world, right in the color side, so this weekend had to re-render like 42 images for a project, and that would’ve taken a week at least, and it took me a couple of hours, it was like a half day. But the isolation tools to outline shapes like effortless and it’s perfect. So anyway, this is not a commercial for Adobe Photoshop, but I will say that those tools are just getting better and better with AI technology. So if we pivot again and talk about the design and construction industry, what has AI brought to the world of BIM? Again, you said that’s building information modeling. Has it changed the game there as well?
Brandon:
Oh, 100%. I mean, there’s tools that we’re using in our tech stack today that, when I started in this industry, we didn’t have. And it made the timeline to deliver a project so much longer. For example, when you talk about early on in the process for field verification and you’re talking about how we used to do a tape and measure, going out to site and having to do it, now that’s all digitized. It’s creating a digital twin using software like Matterport or OpenSpace, which has AI built into it, and you can send one person out to the site, do a scan of the site and then have all that data back in your office to be able to manipulate and use and share with not only your internal team but your clients. So just that alone on the field verification side early in the process has helped.
Sue:
So let me ask you about that because is there a little bit of a trust issue at the beginning when you start using these tools? Do you double check that they’re accurate? I picture that field measuring tool, you scan it with some tool and it would measure the distance of a job site, right?
Brandon:
There’s different cameras for it. And yes, to answer your question, we are always double checking. I mean, I say tape and measure was early. We still use tape and measure because you want that checks and balance. So we’re always validating whether or not the information’s right to the best of our ability. Obviously we don’t have all the time in the world to double check everything, but even on their own website, they verify the accuracy within an X degree of accuracy.
Sue:
Yeah, I mean that’s amazing. Remember the days when we went from GPS to Apple Maps and nobody really trusted the technology and it works. So I love that. I think there’s probably a little learning curve for all of us in this technology space, but they’re all opportunities. So what’s your favorite AI technology that you use so far? What are you really excited about?
Brandon:
Well, I mean it depends on what task I’m trying to complete. And I say that tongue-in-cheek only because there’s so many AI solutions in the market right now, and I can’t say one’s my favorite over the other. Depending on the task though, I could say when we’re talking about just creating visualizations, we have a team dedicated, just visualization. There’s so many cool tools in the market that are blowing my mind on how they’re coming up with this imagery. So you talk about EvolveLAB’s Veras, so Veras is a tool that sits over top of our BIM model, our Revit model that allows us with our Revit model to render out variations of what the project may look like. That didn’t exist even three years ago. So just the fact that that is there is just mind-blowing.
Sue:
Can you describe how that would work?
Brandon:
Yeah, so if you can imagine, we take a project and we model it. So we model it in 3D. So we have a digital representation of what the project will look like, and there’s an add-on that sits on top of Revit that allows you to prompt-based what you might want that project to look like. So you can imagine if you were to say, create me a award-winning rendering with a night effect of a building that sits on Lake Erie to produce a rendering. So I’m generalizing it, but you have to be really good at articulating design. And I actually talk about this with our junior staff and our designers and our principals. How we’re going to start to use AI will really come down to how well you can articulate design. Are you good with your vernacular? Are you good with prompting? Because it’s only as good as what you tell it.
You got to imagine AI is like a small child or a junior designer in the sense that you are starting to leverage what little they know and you have to train it, you have to tell it what you want. So the LLMs, the larger language models, the more you build it, the better they’ll get and you have to help assist it. So that’s where the human aspect comes in because as designers and going to design school, you learned about the different key elements and what it means when you talk about creating design, whether you’re going to have a honed finish versus a matte finish. Those mean things in design world and you have to be able to articulate it because the software won’t know unless you tell it.
Sue:
And it’ll fill in the blanks unless you tell it. And then that’s where you get the wild west, right? Where you get crazy images.
Brandon:
You get the hallucinations, correct. Yes.
Sue:
Yes. Oh, it’s so fun. It’s fun to play around with. It’s really exciting. But I think there’s some ethical questions too, that we’ve talked about. So do your clients have any of those issues or has that come up in your conversations early on, the authenticity factor?
Brandon:
Yeah, so one thing that we try to do is over communicate, over communicate when we’re using AI so that the client knows that we’re using it on a project. Part of my responsibility on the task force was we created an AI governance policy within the firm, which really helped to articulate how we’re using AI, where we can use AI more importantly, where we cannot use AI, how we need to talk to our clients, where are those ethical issues, where are those biases? So it really outlined to our staff what AI is to Vocon and how we should be using it and using it in a way that is productive and not harmful to the project or the client’s vision.
Sue:
Then do you have to evaluate things or do you trust the team as like-
Brandon:
Yeah, so that’s part of the process. We talked about checks and balance within using AI. We should be, at the end, validating whether or not that design was accurate to what we prompted it. One example I give is interesting within the design tool that we use, it sometimes has a bias to swap out male versus female. And when I say swap out, not even swap out, it merges them together. So you get this weird form of a human and we know that’s not right. So what do we need to do? We need to go back in to Photoshop and correct that because we don’t want to put to market something that is not accurate and that’s the importance of that checks and balance.
Sue:
Yeah, that’s great. And again, so it’s about playing around with the tools, understanding their capabilities, trying new things, and then editing. The human side of this is what’s really important and that’s what makes it a powerful tool, but just a tool, it’s not going to take over the world.
Brandon:
Correct. Today they’re just tools. Now I will say as AI gets exponentially better, like I keep talking about, you’re going to need to be able to have different roles within your firm. And we talk about this. What is the makeup of your staff today? You may need to have somebody on your staff that is responsible for AI governancy. It’s a reality that maybe some aren’t ready to face, but it is coming. The jobs and how we do them today are going to shift and we need to be ready and start to train our staff to understand what they used to do may not be what they’re going to be doing in the future.
Sue:
Yes. Well, and that’s a whole other conversation and you’ve been very generous with your time, so we will talk about that another time. But talk about some of your favorite resources where people that are just dipping their toe, smaller firms starting to learn about AI, how can they get started?
Brandon:
So I can share afterwards or provide you with that information, but there is a couple of people that I love to follow on LinkedIn, on social media, YouTube, et cetera, that actually focus particularly on AI in the AEC industry. And this gentleman that I’m referring to has an amazing amount of resources at your disposal to go and look at, where he puts together the top 100 tools in the market that you can start to explore. Because like I mentioned, there’s over 300 applications that you could start to look at some of the… At the very top there I would start to explore, is just within your own ecosystem, whether you’re a Google house or a Microsoft house, how can you start to leverage Copilot for example? You already are paying for that’s part of your subscription, maybe invest some time and energy into evaluating what could Copilot do for you? Others that are free? You can look at ChatGPT.
Now, I will caution what we do for Vocon is make sure if you’re going to use it, you’re not using client information within the products. If you’re going to make sure you’re on an enterprise solution. Enterprise solution basically protects you behind the curtain from your information being put into a large language model for the rest of the world to use. So understanding when and how you’re going to use those applications is very vital, but there are free applications that you can at least start to explore on the surface and understand how they might be leveraged within your office.
Sue:
So Brandon, tell me about this resource hub that you had talked about. You could just mention the website and then we’ll put it in our show notes.
Brandon:
So the website is aiinaec.com. The gentleman does an amazing job at documenting all the various tools within the AEC community. And he even takes it a step further where you can filter by specific types of AI that you’re looking for, whether it’s AI related, it’s just design or management or technical. He does a great job at creating that list for us.
Sue:
That’s wonderful. And it looks like he’s got his own website and then he is on LinkedIn too, so you can find him in both ways. So very cool. Yeah, that’s a great place for people to start. So we’re going to close here, but tell me about what is most exciting for you looking forward in five years? Where do you see technology taking us that maybe we’re not, just blue sky thinking?
Brandon:
Yeah. Well, I mean can’t predict the future, but I will say one of the things that I’m really excited about is the evolution of not only where AI is going, but all these various technologies that are coming to market and how we’re going to start to leverage them. And when I say various technologies, you got to think about robotics, you got to think about autonomy, all these other things that are coming that are going to start to impact within the AEC community. I’m talking how we augment our jobs today and what does that mean for the actual workforce. So AI is one aspect, but there’s so many more technologies that are coming. You talk about quantum computing, I mean that’s just starting to scratch the surface of technology that’s coming. So how we’re going to start to leverage these technologies is going to be so important for not only our projects but our careers.
Sue:
And I think AI is going to be the tool, the human assist that can help with that enormous amounts of data that a human mind would really be hard for us to process that. That’s where AI can help.
Brandon:
And I mean that’s where you’re starting to see a terminology called AI agents coming to market. Those are your AI assists where it’s not a human that you’re interacting with. It truly is the computer, but don’t be feared by that.
Sue:
Right? I want that so much.
Brandon:
I mean, imagine if we could all have our own personal assistant.
Sue:
Totally.
Brandon:
How awesome would that be? You can start to offload-
Sue:
Tony Stark-
Brandon:
These tasks.
Sue:
Jarvis, I want it. I want it so much. I know it’ll happen.
Brandon:
Biggest message I could leave is don’t fear technology. Learn to embrace it because that’s been our journey as humans. We have evolved technologically throughout the evolution of our existence and this is just the next journey.
Sue:
Brandon, mic drop moment. We’re going to quote it here. You’ve been an awesome guest. I very much appreciate it. Thank you for your time. Any other closing thoughts or just I think it’s don’t fear. Don’t fear the tech. It’s here to help.
Brandon:
Don’t fear technology. And I appreciate you having me on. I love talking technology. I could go on and on.
Sue:
Me too.
