George ProudFounder

United Kingdom - London, England

Over the last decade I have studied and taught at world-class universities, worked at inspiring design studios and helped bring beautiful projects to life through visualisation. These projects spanned the globe, small private residential projects, huge urban developments, high-end retail and art installations at internationally renowned museums.

The common thread throughout all of this work has been Technology.

In the early 2010’s I couldn't wait to get the first commercially available VR headset, Oculus DK1. The use case of virtual reality in Architecture and Design seemed so self-evident to me. The path from first putting that headset on, to now, has taken me through traditional CGI and animation, VR, AR, the metaverse, real-time rendering, interactive applications, 3D printing and parametric modelling, to name a few. All of these technologies have had huge impacts on not only my own practice, but on both design processes and output globally, the full potential of which has still not yet been fully realised.

But then AI happened.

The advent of ‘Generative AI’ is game changing, its impact on the world cannot be overstated, and already touches on each of the aforementioned technological breakthroughs. Trying out Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Chatgpt in late 2022 was like putting on that headset again for the first time. The potential of this technology, for both good and bad, is bordering on unfathomable, but the use case for Architecture and Design again seemed self-evident.

However, there is a reason why Designers communicate through technical drawings, rendered images and animations, and that’s because words are never enough. ‘Prompt Engineering’ will never be enough, and ‘Hallucinations’, AKA errors, are unacceptable in a professional context.

This is why Generative AI has only been used in professional design practice for concept images, look and feel - finding the right vibe. But design professionals need more, they need specificity and they need control.

This is why Will Jones and I co-founded Gendo. We’re building professional grade AI for Designers, the way they need it.