TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Studio Practice · AGE 18—20 · POSITIONAL · METHOD
Map the workflow before adding AI
Draw the workflow you actually follow, because the friction lives in the real one.
When to use
Before adopting any AI tool into a project, a studio, or your own semester — and again whenever the way you work has drifted from the last map.
The method
Draw the workflow you actually follow, not the one you would describe to a jury: every step from brief to submission, with who does it, what it produces, and how long it really takes. Mark the three hardest steps — the ones that eat nights. For each, ask two questions: would an AI reduce the friction here, and would it replace the part that is the point? Only then place tools on the map. Mark the places where the answer is "no" as clearly as the places where it is "yes".
Watch for this
Mapping the ideal process. A map of how design "should" happen shows nowhere for AI to help, because the friction lives in the real one — the 2 a.m. render, the fourth redraw of the section, the minutes nobody wrote.
The Lab's note
Map before tools is how we run every engagement, and the Lab keeps it as a standing rule in its own codex. The reason is not efficiency. No workflow is neutral. Every one carries a view of how design should happen, and the map is where that view becomes visible enough to argue with.
Try it
Map your last studio project honestly, hour by hour. Mark the three steps that hurt. Argue, in writing, which of them an AI actually helps with, and which it would hollow out.
Prove it
Show a real workflow map with its three hardest steps marked and a defended yes or no for each.
How it works
Tools enter a process at its weak points, and you can only find the weak points in the real process. The map shows a second thing that is harder to see. A workflow that renders before it plans has already decided that the image comes first. Adding AI to that workflow speeds up that decision. The map lets you see it before it speeds up.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
Sources
- workflow-map-before-tools
- When the Lab Became a Language — when-the-lab-became-a-language-a
- Jiang, Xiao, Hurley & Liu, 2026
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.