Ep 52: AI in Interior Design: A Candid Conversation with Sarah Daniele
Listen to the Podcast Episode for a deeper dive
AI in Interior Design: A Candid Conversation with Sarah Daniele
Sarah Daniele flips the script and interviews Jenna — a peer-to-peer conversation between two people who have been building design technology together for years, talking honestly about what the tools actually do and where it is all going.
- AI imagery is visual communication, not a replacement for rendering. ChatGPT with DALL-E generates quick mock-ups that speed up client feedback loops. It cannot replace a measured, detailed render — and that matters for construction work.
- Visual Electric lets you build a branded style that stays consistent across every output. By uploading your logo and reference images, you create a preset style that applies your brand's color and feeling automatically — so you are not re-explaining your aesthetic every time.
- Notetakers are the most underutilized category in designer workflows. Recording meetings and running the transcript through an LLM to draft proposals is one of the highest-value, lowest-effort AI applications available right now.
- The Typeform → ChatGPT → MyDoma onboarding flow is a concrete, repeatable system. A seven-year onboarding questionnaire workflow, now accelerated by AI, produces a client profile that launches a project in MyDoma with all rooms pre-configured in minutes.
- Google Notebook LM is Sarah's favorite underrated tool. Feeding multiple sources — videos, PDFs, transcripts, links — into one notebook and having it generate an audio podcast-style summary is a genuinely different way to learn and retain complex information.
Sarah Daniele is the co-founder of MyDoma — the design project management and visualization platform she and her husband built to solve the problems they ran into while running their own design firm. MyDoma acquired Jenna's eDesign Tribe and eDesignU in 2022, and was subsequently acquired by Studio Designer. Sarah now serves as Principal of Designer Solutions across both platforms, working with thousands of design firms on workflow and technology adoption.
Visual Communication: What Is Actually Working Right Now
Sarah opened by asking Jenna for her top visual tools — and the answer is clear-eyed about what AI imagery can and cannot do. The category Jenna keeps coming back to is visual communication: getting ideas on screen fast enough to get genuine client feedback before investing hours in a polished render.
The key distinction she makes throughout this episode: AI-generated images are for ideation and communication. They are not for construction documents. They are not accurate enough at scale for structural decisions. Anyone claiming otherwise "has no idea what goes into a project." That line matters — because it protects the designer's role while making the case for the tool.
"Visual communication has never been more real with AI right now. It is not replacing rendering — it is cutting down on revisions you would have to make after a render that took 13 hours."
— Jenna GaidusekWhy Visual Electric's Style System Changes the Game for Designers
Sarah pushed on Visual Electric specifically — how does it differ from just using ChatGPT for imagery? The answer is the style system. In ChatGPT, you have to re-explain your aesthetic every conversation. It is chat-based: you describe what you want, it generates, you describe adjustments, it regenerates. There is no persistent style memory.
Visual Electric works more like Photoshop on a canvas — you work directly on an image rather than through a text thread. More importantly, you can save a brand style: upload your logo, add reference images that represent your aesthetic, and the tool generates a style description that you can apply with one click to any future output. Jenna's saved style is described as "futuristic nod to nostalgia" — blending her brand colors into a consistent visual language that is immediately recognizable across everything she posts.
For client project work, this means you could create a project-specific style based on the client's inspiration images and apply it consistently throughout the ideation phase. Instead of generating from scratch each time, you are generating within a defined aesthetic territory that matches how the client found you in the first place.
The style system also solves the "generic AI aesthetic" problem. Rather than getting outputs that look like everyone else's AI content, your Visual Electric generations look like yours — because the style is built from your actual portfolio and brand identity.
Notetakers and the Meeting-to-Proposal Workflow
Sarah uses Zoom's AI Companion. Jenna uses Loom — which now integrates directly with Zoom to record meetings, automatically generate timestamped outlines, and produce action items in her video library. For in-person meetings and job site walkthroughs, she uses Plaud: a physical device that records two-way conversations and generates clean, searchable transcripts.
But the notetaker is just the capture layer. The workflow that follows is where the value really compounds:
Jenna's observation: the post-meeting proposal process used to take several hours — gathering notes, making sure nothing was missing, writing to the client's specific requests, formatting. Now the meeting is the work. The proposal is the output of a 15-minute AI processing session.
The Typeform → ChatGPT → MyDoma Onboarding Flow
Jenna has been using a Typeform onboarding questionnaire for seven years — originally built because she has always worked virtually and needed a way to get comprehensive project information without the friction of a phone call before the relationship was established. The questionnaire now includes AI-generated flatlays showing different room aesthetics so clients can point to images rather than trying to describe styles in words they may not know.
After the questionnaire, the workflow connects directly to project setup in MyDoma through its AI assistant, Max:
"That comma separation — it sounds like nothing, but it saves half an hour on a big project because Max reads it like a spreadsheet and sets up every single room view instantly."
— Jenna GaidusekGoogle Notebook LM — Sarah's Favorite Tool Nobody Is Talking About Enough
Sarah brought up Google Notebook LM as one of her most-used tools, specifically for learning. The concept: instead of Googling one question and getting one answer, you feed multiple sources on a topic — YouTube videos, PDFs, transcripts, website links — into a single notebook, and then ask questions or request summaries across all of it simultaneously.
For designers specifically, the applications are wide. Put every document, transcript, and note from a client project into one notebook and search across all of it in conversation. Ask "what did we say about the pendant placement?" and get an answer that references specific points from specific meetings. Put building code updates, permit requirements, and contractor communications into a notebook and have it explain what changed and what you need to know.
Sarah's favorite feature: the audio summary. Notebook LM can generate a podcast-style dialogue between two AI voices summarizing the content of your notebook. If you are more of an auditory learner, this is a radically different way to absorb complex information — and the results are significantly better than most AI-generated audio because the source material is your actual documents, not a hallucinated summary.
Find it at: Search "Google Notebook LM" — it is a Google product accessible with any standard Google account. Free tier available.
Disclaimer: This blog was written using AI as a recap from the recording then edited by the author for accuracy and details.
