Week 9 (July 21 - August 4): Fresh Perspective

Coding is King

Since I had focused almost all my energy on researching and investigating different AI solutions the past couple weeks, this week I’m deciding to return to my codebase to build more functionality to my application.

So far, my app only has 3 screens, the introduction screen, sign up, and login. These screens are also non functional, as although I had learned how to read and write data to Firebase, I had not implemented this functionality yet to make a functioning signup/login. To do this, I have to connect my database with my app, so when users type in a username and password, it has to check if this information is saved in the database.

Next, I want to add the ‘Choose Your Styles’ unique functionality where when the user first creates an account, they get to choose from an array of 200 images, and they will be recommended their preferred interior design style. To do this, I’m using the 200 unique interior design images I gathered from Week 2 in my blog, which are each attached to a style of interior design (Scandinavian, Industrial style, Mid-Century Modern, etc). The style that the user selects the most of, will be shown and saved as their ‘Preferred Style’.

I also want to include several onboarding screens using Coby’s work from Week 5 as inspiration:

Onboarding screen designs Coby created when we worked together on the UI design. The user selections will be saved in my Firebase database.

I also have to create a new screen, which will be a ‘home’ screen for the user. To do this, I used inspiration from Coby’s UI design work way back from Week 5:

Coby’s Figma design for the Homepages, as well as a tutorial function

Putting this all together, after 2 weeks of coding I was able to add a working Login/Signup, and these several onboarding screens:

Using Coby’s work as reference, I designed a home screen with buttons for similar functionalities at the bottom of the screen. I added buttons for ‘Home/Layouts’, ‘AI’, ‘Notifications’, and ‘Profile’. I didn’t add functionality to the buttons yet aside from the home screen, because I was unsure what the AI functionality should be yet.

Homepage of my app which will eventually store floor plans that the user creates. At the bottom there buttons for AI, notifications, and profile functionalities

Frankenstein

Now that I had developed the onboarding screens and linking it together to my Firebase over these two weeks, I also had a while to think about what my AI feature would be, now that I’m shifting away from generating floorplan designs.

I still had Stable Diffusion on my mind; but this time instead of using it to generate floorplan images, which wasn’t in it’s strengths, I decided to lean into what it was trained to do: generate general images based on text input. I realized an functionality that could help DIY home designers is if they could generate an image to brainstorm interior design ideas, similar to how one would use Pinterest to brainstorm outfit ideas. My vision utilizing Stable Diffusion has been reborn!

A great way to do this is to implement an ‘AI Chat’ feature, where the user can type a message of their imagined dream room would look like, and then I can send that message to Stable Diffusion. This way, the user will be able to create any design from their imagination by simply typing it out.

Next Steps

The following week I will continue development by figuring out the best way to implement my new AI chat idea using Stable Diffusion’s API.