More Adventures in AI-Assisted Industrial Design

I dug up some old concept sketches I did for a client on the subject of a robotic barrel cooler that would roam venues and serve up cold beverages. The basic form was to be something friendly and engaging that would be like bolting an ice barrel cooler onto a Roomba and making it friend-shaped. After browsing Pinterest for inspiration, I made eleven quick thumbnail sketches on a tablet to explore some basic forms. The project never went anywhere, but I thought the sketches might be fun to plug in to Google’s Nano Banana (in the beta version of Photoshop) for a quick prompt and see what it spit out. The sketches are below.

Initial exploration sketches

I took each one of the sketches into Photoshop and asked Nano Banana 3.0 to generate a rendering based upon the sketch. My first prompt was:

“Render this sketch concept of a colorful robot that is designed to merchandise cold drinks in a store.  It would feature body consisting of an ice bucket with a clear lid that would hold canned beverages.  There would be colorful generic branding on the exterior referring to the cold beverages inside. Wheels under the base skirt, which also functions as a bumper, allow it to move about the store.” The remaining prompts evolved with each successive attempt as I learned what I needed to add or subtract to improve my results.This resulted in my last prompt:

“Render this sketch concept of yellow and blue robot that is designed to merchandise cold drinks in a store.  It would feature body consisting of an ice bucket with a clear lid that would hold canned beverages.  The location of two camera ports situated left and right of the clear lid, in conjunction with the handle recess in front, give the top of the unit a playful “face”.  There would be a colorful generic graphic wrap encircling the center section that calls attention to the cold beverages inside. The narrowest area above the base would feature camera ports for navigation spaced evenly around the perimeter.  Four evenly spaced wheels under the base skirt, which also functions as a bumper, allow it to move about the store.”

The resulting renderings are depicted below. Obviously some results were better than others, but as someone who started out doing renderings by hand on traditional media, seeing a rendering appear in a few seconds that looks photographic seems downright magical and delightful. If this were a real project, the next step would be selecting one or two for further refinement. I may do that in my next post. Which one is your favorite?

Output of Nana Banana 3.0