Don't Outsource Your Intelligence: Using AI Without Losing Your Creative Voice

• Explore what it really means to design, rather than simply produce a design.
• Consider how AI can support and extend the creative process without replacing human judgement.
• Understand why developing design knowledge and critical thinking matters before relying on AI-generated solutions.
• Discover why the ability to recognise, question and refine a good answer may become even more valuable as AI makes plausible answers easier to produce.

Hosted by Academy Creative Producer Fiona Byrne, this NACA Creative Conversation explores the changing relationship between design intelligence, human judgement and artificial intelligence.

Drawing on Lisa’s experience in professional practice and education, the conversation will examine what a designer brings to the creative process that technology alone cannot: an understanding of people, context, behaviour and experience; the ability to question assumptions; and the judgement to recognise whether a proposed solution genuinely works.

Lisa will also explore AI from a pragmatic designer’s perspective. Just as tools such as AutoCAD and SketchUp have changed how designers work, AI has the potential to interrogate, accelerate and extend parts of the design process. The challenge is learning how to use those tools without outsourcing the intelligence that makes the work your own.

Lisa Bafagih is an interior designer, interior architect and educator whose practice centres on interior architecture, spatial planning and the adaptive reconfiguration of existing spaces.

Working primarily across residential restructuring and building extensions, Lisa helps clients rethink how spaces function and how they are experienced. She also collaborates with artists on the planning of art and exhibition spaces.

Alongside her professional practice, Lisa has taught with IDAI and the British Academy of Interior Design since 2013 and delivers teaching and workshops in Cork City. Her approach to both practice and education is grounded in a belief that good design is fundamentally about people — understanding how they think, behave and communicate, and developing the judgement to create spaces that respond meaningfully to their needs.

With a first career in music before moving into interior architecture, Lisa has a particular interest in how creative judgement develops and how digital processes shape creative ideas. As AI becomes increasingly embedded in creative practice, her focus is on how designers can embrace new tools while ensuring that a clear and authentic human voice remains at the centre of the work.