TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Studio Practice · AGE 21—22 · POSITIONAL · METHOD
Stage a studio's adoption
Audit, pilot on one real project, review every quarter, and name one thing to stop.
When to use
When a studio — or a student's own practice — decides to adopt AI deliberately rather than one download at a time.
The method
Three months, three stages. Month one, literacy: audit the workflow (the map from the core ring), choose a small set of tools by engine family, and write down what is safe to use them on. Month two, workflow: use them on real work — briefs, moodboards, research, presentations — on one pilot project, not across the studio. Month three, studio habits: turn what worked into a brief library, a file protocol, a review checklist and internal examples, and drop what did not. Then a standing rule: review every quarter, and at each review name one thing to stop.
Watch for this
A plan with no "stop and review" in it. A list of tools with dates is a shopping list. The pilot project and the quarterly review are what make it a plan: they are where failure gets noticed and dropped.
The Lab's note
Three months and three stages is the Lab's roadmap, not a law of practice. Another studio might stage it over six months, or by project rather than by month. What we hold to is the shape — audit, pilot, review, a rule for stopping — because the plans we see fail lack one of those, and the calendar is only there to make sure the review happens.
Try it
Draft a staged adoption plan for a small studio you know, with a milestone at each month. Name the pilot project. Write the agenda of the first quarterly review, including what would make you drop a tool.
Prove it
Show a plan where a reader can point to the audit, the pilot, the review date, and the rule for dropping what failed.
How it works
Adoption usually fails by scatter: five tools, no pilot, nobody whose job it is to review. The staging exists to make dropping a tool routine rather than embarrassing. This is the Lab's own ninety-day roadmap — its own material, shared in workshops as a single page. Surveys of UK practice show adoption running ahead of policy in many studios, which is exactly the scatter the staging prevents; the Indian picture is not yet surveyed.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
Sources
- 05_90-day-roadmap
- DES.A
- RIBA AI Report 2025
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.