TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Studio Practice · AGE 19—22 · POSITIONAL · METHOD

Lock what must not move

Write what to keep before the prompt says what to make.

When to use

Any grounded generation, image or video, that starts from something you have already decided: a massing, a plan, a material palette, a person's face, a frame proportion.

The method

Before the prompt says what to make, write what to keep. List it plainly: preserve all geometry exactly; preserve the typography; do not add objects; do not change the light direction; preserve the figure's identity; preserve the material palette; preserve the aspect ratio. Paste that block at the end of every prompt in the execution phase. Then give the block teeth, because a written instruction asks; the system's own controls enforce. Where the geometry must hold exactly, protect it with a control the engine cannot argue with: a mask that keeps the engine out of the regions that must not change, a conditioning input — a depth map, an edge map, your own line drawing — that holds the structure, or a deterministic composite that pastes the decided parts back over the generated ones. After generation, check the block line by line against the output — did the geometry hold, did the palette hold — before you look at whether the image is good.

Watch for this

Drift you did not notice because you were looking at what changed. A preservation block only works if you check it: the engine honours it more often than not, never always. "Preserve all geometry exactly" is a brief, not a lock; emphatic wording does not become a guarantee.

The Lab's note

Naming what to keep is as much a design act as naming what to make. This is the Lab's standing rule for grounded work, from its own playbook on AI video. Others rely on reference strength alone. We write the block, because a decision that is not written down is a decision the engine makes for you.

Try it

Add a preservation block to one grounded prompt. Generate. Remove the block and generate again. Lay both beside the source and circle every difference. List the parts of the scene that drift most — you will find they are edges, counts and faces.

Prove it

Show one grounded generation with its preservation block, and the drift that appeared when the block was removed.

How it works

A generator does not know which parts of your reference are decisions and which are accidents. Conditioning methods — the family of techniques behind holding a reference — pull the output toward the reference, but the pull is statistical, and a conditioned diffusion model is still a generator, not a CAD constraint solver. A written preservation instruction narrows the draw further; a mask or a composite removes the draw from the parts that must not move; and a visual check, or an overlay diff against the source, closes the rest of the gap. When a generation drifts, the missing line is usually a "do not change" nobody wrote down, and the missing control is usually a mask nobody drew.

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.

Age grows from 11 at the centre to 22 at the edge, and six sectors show the learning strands. Tab into the map and the arrow keys step from idea to idea, following the links where there is one. Enter opens the idea under the cursor, and E reads out its links and the reason recorded on each. Press slash for Search, question mark for the full key list, and Escape to leave. Open Ideas for the complete readable list, including what each idea builds on and what it opens up.

LOGIKA · RBDS AI LAB INDIA
ON-RAMP · AGE 11 · FIRST ENCOUNTERS, NOT GATES — IDEAS · — DEPENDENCIES
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