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Paper short abstract

The study explores how AI and machine learning reshape architects’ daily experience of work, showing that AI not only adds new tools but transforms their sense of professional agency by reorganizing practices, material arrangements, and understandings of expert design.

Paper long abstract

Architects are a knowledge-based occupation combining higher education, creativity, and a strong craft tradition. The recent integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is associated with profound changes, challenging how creativity and craft are enacted in architectural work. This study argues that AI does not merely introduce new tools but reconfigures how architects sense and perform their occupational practice. From a practice theory perspective, architectural work appears as a nexus of doings and a feel for professionalism, organized around shared understandings of creativity, expertise, and professional autonomy. AI tools—such as parametric design systems and analytical platforms for site, environmental, and regulatory data—reshape the material arrangements through which these practices unfold. Rather than simply automating tasks, AI alters the conditions under which design experimentation becomes possible, transforming architects’ practical intelligibility: what feels and counts as appropriate action, creative contribution, or professional judgment. Architects’ “juggling” of AI tools shows that technologies do not seamlessly integrate into practice but require continuous coordination, interpretation, and alignment. In practice-theoretical terms, architects actively reproduce and stabilize their occupation by negotiating new sociomaterial configurations, engaging with data, and creating coherence across organizational boundaries. AI thus becomes embedded in the everyday accomplishment of architectural practice, reshaping workflows as well as the lived experience of agency, creativity, and professional identity.