This page is about how our innovation fulfills the three Design Thinking Principles. We also discuss how we used AI.
What is your innovation, and what specific problem or user need does it address?
Generating concept images through AI rather than using real world materials. Simply.
Creating concept art is a time consuming and expensive process, each picture takes a lot of effort to produce, and most of them don't see the light of day. Our innovation aims to make this process more efficient. Our idea is to generate pictures using AI tools. The user gives the program a picture of a piece of furniture and in return gets the furniture in a new context, with new surroundings and a different appeal.
Who are your target users, and how will your innovation benefit them?
Our target users are IKEA’s marketing section. Our innovation will help them lower cost on concept art generation, and also make it more time efficient. With AI-generated image they just have to take pictures of a product in an empty room and then upload it to KRAFT, KRAFT will then generate images based on the settings applied and give the user concept art in return.
What are the potential barriers to implementation, including those related to sustainability, and how will you address them?
The potential barriers to implementation of our solution is mostly caused by technical aspects. We do not have the time or the resources to train a model on strictly IKEA products or american kitchens. We also do not have powerful enough computers to generate really good pictures fast. These problems are close to impossible to completely solve for us, since they require resources we do not have. There should not be any real barriers related to sustainability since generating these pictures should always be more efficient than building a whole set etc.
How does your innovation align with IKEA’s vision, business idea, sustainability strategy, and key values?
Our innovation certainly aligns with IKEAs value of caring for the planet, changing the way that concept art is generated will cut the material needs of production. Instead the user will have concept art a few button clicks away.
What unique value does your innovation offer compared to existing solutions in the market, particularly with regard to sustainability?
Our innovation offers a much better/simplified interface specified for generating prompts that are “tailored” for changing the environment around the chosen IKEA product. It can be very challenging to find and use an AI that can generate good images, while still retaining the whole selected product. In regards to sustainability it doesn’t offer anything new compared to other image generating services. The real gain in sustainability comes from the specific user group we have. To not have to create concept art the labor and material consuming way and instead generate images with a computer is a victory for the environment.
How did we use AI in our Capstone?
Our product is highly dependent on generative AI. The core idea is to use an AI model to generate images based on prompting and an image to image feature. More specifically we used stable diffusion, which is an open source generative AI model.