Partnering with AI to create a wellness tourism experience
Lianhe Zaobao, 1 Dec 2024, 与AI搭档 借力共创疗愈旅居 (summarised translation)
The first “Reimagine The Future of Hospitality with A.I.” competition invited architectural design students from around the world to use artificial intelligence software to imagine and design the future of wellness tourism. Two local students won the second and third prizes for their luxury wellness retreat concept and the nature-inspired immersive wellness experience respectively. The two shared how AI helped them optimise their designs and pushed them to imagine boldly.
WATG Singapore, an international architecture, landscape and interior design company that celebrates its 80th anniversary next year, held its first student design competition “Reimagine The Future of Hospitality with A.I.”, inviting architecture and design students from around the world to use AI software tools to imagine and design the future of wellness hospitality. The competition received more than 100 entries, and 10 were shortlisted for the finals.
The first prize went to “Mountain Sanctuary”, which was designed by Angus Tung, a master's student in interior design at the Royal College of Art in London. He used AI to "create" a wellness retreat concept nestled in the misty green mountains. The Chinese-style building has a green hill behind the courtyard and a small bridge with flowing water in front. Even if this wellness hotel was imagined by AI, the images will give people the feeling of retreating to the countryside and being at peace at first glance.
Designer-led AI assistance
The second and third prizes were won by two local design students. The second prize winner is Liu Ziyi, a 19-year-old student studying architecture at Singapore Polytechnic. Originally from China, he drew inspiration from willow trees and set up his conceived “Healing Horizons” hotel on “territories” that look like giant flying saucers or lotus leaves. They are suspended in the air with industrial-grade steel cables and connected to the central branches, just like the drooping willow leaves by the river and the floating duckweed in the pond. Owners can use AI to tailor various meditation and healing experiences for guests, and adjust the temperature, light, sound, etc. according to their emotional needs, helping guests to relax and regain vitality.
The third prize winner is 21-year-old Janessa Kwan, a third-year student studying Architecture and Sustainable Design at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). Her wellness centre, Zenith Cove, is organically shaped, like a giant translucent conch embedded in a small bay, connecting with the surrounding forest greenery, and merging the sea and sky.
Using AI to imagine and design a non-existent future space is obviously a science fiction field that artificial intelligence technology can control. The reporter was curious about who plays the role of main designer and collaborator when humans and artificial intelligence “work together”. Two local architecture students used examples to illustrate that using AI software does not mean being a "lazy" designer.
Janessa emphasised that she was very conscious of not being led by AI during the design process. Liu Ziyi said that the initial concept must come from the designer himself. Before communicating with AI, the designer must think carefully about his own ideas so that he can lead the design direction and finally reach the desired destination, rather than just getting in the car and letting AI drive to the ends of the earth.
Janessa Kwan: Optimising AI concepts
Before designing Zenith Cove, the material that Janessa used to conceive the architectural form was almost primitive - a piece of white paper. She treated the square paper as a leaf obtained from nature, cut and folded it into a satisfactory shape, took a photo, and uploaded it to an AI software called Stable Diffusion as a concept prototype. This is a deep learning software developed by the CompVis research group of the University of Munich and launched in 2022. It can generate detailed images based on text descriptions. She also used an AI model called ControlNet to greatly improve the controllability and accuracy of AI image generation.
Janessa prompted the AI based on the lines and shapes of the origami picture, and used ControlNet to add control conditions to guide Stable Diffusion to generate images according to her creative ideas. However, the machine may not be able to generate the images she likes. She said: “AI is a good assistant and brainstorming object. The advantage is that it can quickly generate ideas to stimulate design progress. After I uploaded the drawing, it was able to generate four ideas based on my drawing within two seconds. I can take some of my favorite elements and develop new drawings, advancing layer by layer, and constantly optimising my concepts. For example, the prompt I originally set was: surrounded by nature, a hotel built in the forest. But a certain version of the generated picture showed a bay full of green trees, which gave me an unexpected surprise and eventually led me to the current finished product.”
In Janessa’s eyes, wellness tourism is about returning to nature, and the space that provides a wellness hospitality experience must be presented in the form of biophilic design. Her works are designed to separate the inside and the outside. The hotel's exterior is like translucent glass, allowing sunlight to penetrate and break the boundary between indoor and outdoor; the white interior is covered with bark and branch-like stripes, and guests can sit in meditation and practice yoga comfortably and peacefully, while their senses can still connect with the outside and download the energy from nature into their bodies.