AI has been on everyone's lips since ChatGPT.
Even if some people may find it a bit annoying or freightening, it's almost impossible to tun escape this topic. And the exhibition stand construction industry is not immune to this either.
exhibition stand design with AI / exhibition stand design with artificial intelligence
The Past
Until now, it was necessary to invest hours of computer-aided manual work in order to create an outstanding individual exhibition stand design that not only satisfies the customer, but also thrills the trade fair visitors.
Exhibitors sometimes send inquiries to various designers or exhibition construction companies and compare designs and prices in order to decide on the best or most suitable solution. All of this takes a lot of time and effort even before the contract is actually concluded.
Finally the stand producers suppliers bear the costs of it in form of wasted working time of their employees. If you scale this effect up, they result in a considerable market inefficiency that is difficult to quantify but financially too real to be ignored.
However, it seems this is about to change now.
exhibition stand design with AI / exhibition stand design with artificial intelligence
The Present
Visual AIs are increasingly springing up like mushrooms, e.g. text-to-image, image-to-image, sketch-to-image, etc. Whether Dall-E, Midjourney or Leonardo.ai - the ratio of effort to result is really overwhelming at first glance.
However, the results are often not sufficiently accurate. Actually, there is always something that doesn't quite correspond to the ideas that one is trying to “prompt” into the AI. This is particularly true when it comes to crucial details or specific geometric dimensions. Because with very long or very detailed prompts, the AIs can have issues interpreting and prioritizing.
Each model has it's own advantages and weaknesses in comparison. Therefore only those users who cleverly combine different AI models or apply smart recursive prompting, are currently able to achieve qualitative and almost precise results in niche areas.
However, if you consider the speed at which the quality of such models improves, it is only a matter of time until the described problems will be resolved.
exhibition stand design with AI / exhibition stand design with artificial intelligence
The near Future
AI-based previews for trade fair stand designs could already be implemented relatively easy. This would help to respond more quickly and substantially to inquiries from potential customers and though to achieve a better conversion rate and real-time advantage against competitiors.
It wouldn't be far-fetched implementing to the website of a stand producer an AI-based stand design function in order to offer customers the opportunity to generate rough design ideas and transmit them in the course of their request. Keyword: Software-As-A-Service.
There are certainly quite a few exhibition stand construction companies that have already received in the attachment of emails, one or another customer-made AI exhibition stand design - even though they didn't ask for it. But who can blame the customers? Because pictures often say more than words!
Fully AI-based exhibition stand designs are usually still limited to static images. I.e. professional and motionable 3D mockups can not just casually be created with AI, yet. There are already some plug-ins or functions in CAD software, which partially support traditional CAD with artificial intelligence, However, this is far from the end of the story in respect of efficiency.
exhibition stand design with AI / exhibition stand design with artificial intelligence
The Future
The key is not just in the visual design itself. An AI that wants to establish itself in exhibition stand design space in the long term, must be able to convert designs into straight-forward construction plans, material lists and at least rough production budgets. Or of adressing the solution vice versa: A software must be able to analyze the AI results graphically and interprete them geometrically.
A possible solution would be, e.g. to create a suitable AI model with 3D object files (such as ".obj") as well as to train a model with a database of already existing construction plans and material lists belonging to designs. Remaining inconsistencies could finally still be adjusted manually by the designers or project managers. However, it is a highly complex matter to set up such an all-in-one software if it should be really usable in a B2B context.
exhibition stand design with AI / exhibition stand design with artificial intelligence
Conclusion
One thing is very obvious:
Efficiency, scalability and sustainability are becoming increasingly important every day in the course of digitization and global market concentration - not just to grow, but also to be able maintaining acquired market share.
Companies that are already preparing for this paradigm shift now and perhaps even engaging in developing it, will probably play a key role in the future.
exhibition stand design with AI / exhibition stand design with artificial intelligencedesign
Finally
If we ourselves at XTH SENSE (without any exhibition stand designing experience), can even generate after just a short period of experimentation, results for exhibition stand design previews that might not even be too bad, then it becomes even clearer how much potential is in the pipeline when professional exhibition stand designers and AI experts stick their heads together to develop a industry-disrupting solution.
We think the topic is extremely exciting and are currently weighing up the extent to which we can support our exhibition construction customers on profiting from the transformation.
You can see some of our AI-based exhibition stand design experiments on Pinterest and Flickr:
Here three very quick and dirty examples:
