Generative AI-supported interior concept design: An assessment of end product creativity between designers and non-designers

Interior designers are professionals with experience to deal with functional and aesthetic aspects of interiors. From the concept to the final product, they are in charge of the entire design process. In this process, the concept is the seed of a design. A good concept arises from a designer’s creativity, tacit knowledge, and explicit knowledge. Developing a proper concept is an arduous task. However, the recent developments of the Artificial intelligence (AI) platforms have made interior concept design more simplified, regardless of subject-specific creativity and professional expertise. The key is in the text-to-image ability of generative AI. In this context, this research examines the differences in creativity between interior designers and others in developing generative AI-supported interior concept designs. It ascertains if there is a significant difference in creativity between interior designers, other designers and non-designers when using generative AI to produce interior design concepts. The investigation seeks to determine task satisfaction and overall creativity in terms of novelty, resolution and elaboration and synthesis among the three types of designers using valid assessment tools. For this, nine graduate students in three groups comprised of interior designers, other designers such as graphic and textile designers and non-designers were subjected to a quantitative study. They were assigned a 45-minute brief design activity to create a conceptual interior space using Midjourney AI. The creativity of the final output was graded by a panel of experts using the Creative Product Semantic Scale (CPSS). Results reveals that interior design concept designed by other designers are more creative than the non-designers and that there was no significant difference in creativity between the interior designers and the other designers. Furthermore, other designers had the highest task satisfaction of working with generative AI over interior designers and non-designers. Indeed, the results show that the domain-specific expertise is not significant in terms of creativity in the presence of generative AI.