TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Studio Practice · AGE 19—22 · FACTUAL · EVOLVING
What may be uploaded
A drawing is sorted into safe, anonymise first or never, and the contract decides the third.
The dilemma
It is eleven at night, the client's drawing set is open, and a model could summarise the structural consultant's forty-page report in a minute. The drawings carry the client's name, the plot number, the budget and a consultant's stamp. Paste, or stop?
The choices
Paste and hope. Or sort first, into three piles. Safe to upload: your own sketches, public information, generic questions. Anonymise first: drawings with names, addresses, budgets and identifiable people removed — then check whether what remains still identifies the project. Never: anything under a non-disclosure agreement, anything the contract says stays in the studio, anything that is another party's intellectual property, anything personal about a client or a user of the building. The third pile is decided by the contract and the law, not by convenience. Note that those are different reasons: personal-data law, a confidentiality clause, a non-disclosure agreement, copyright, security and the studio's own policy each forbid a different thing, and the four-risks card on this map takes them one at a time.
The consequence
A pasted drawing may be retained, reviewed, or used for training, depending on the provider's terms that week. Once out, it does not come back. It is a breach whether or not the client ever finds out. Sorting takes five minutes. A breach can end the relationship.
The case
An intern uploads a hospital's floor plans to get a room-schedule table. The plans show the pharmacy store and the server room. The hospital's agreement with the studio forbids sharing drawings with third parties. Nobody meant harm. The studio now has to tell the client.
Take it to crit
Before the student uploads a client's drawing, ask what in it should never leave the studio. Did they check the contract before pasting, and can they show the three piles?
How it works
Providers' data terms differ — consumer and business tiers often differ inside one company — and they change, which is why this card carries a review date. India now has an enacted data-protection framework: the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, and the DPDP Rules, 2025, notified in November 2025 and commencing in phases over eighteen months, with the bulk of the obligations — the children's-data provisions among them — scheduled for May 2027. It concerns personal data: names, addresses, the people in the photographs. What it requires of a particular studio in a particular case is a question for a lawyer, not for this card. The habit comes before any law: know what you hold in trust, and treat every outside model as a third party, because it is one.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
Sources
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.