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- What's Next With Noble: AI in the Spaces Around Us
What's Next With Noble: AI in the Spaces Around Us
How Design Stays Human as Spaces Get Smarter

The Lead: How Spaces and Studios Learn
Technology is already everywhere in our lives—woven into how we work, travel, shop, and play. AI is the next layer of that fabric. It can learn faster, generate faster, and surface answers at incredible speed. But the real question isn’t what AI can do; it’s how we use it to solve the right problems in the right places. That’s the shift we’re focused on: moving from endless possibilities to meaningful applications that make spaces more adaptive, useful, and human.
Most buildings and public spaces weren’t designed for change. Their systems are static, their schedules rigid, and their operations reactive. The result? Friction for people and inefficiency for operators. A space that can’t adapt quickly enough feels outdated almost as soon as it opens.
AI changes that. Not as spectacle or gadgetry, but as infrastructure. It creates feedback loops that help environments learn and respond in real time. A stadium can adjust crowd flow before a bottleneck forms. A campus can translate its tours for visitors instantly. A transit hub can flag a system failure before it cascades.
This is the move from analog to adaptive—when places stop waiting to be fixed and start flexing with the people inside them. That’s how we see it: AI as more than a tool. It’s a catalyst for designing environments that feel human first. Adaptive systems don’t announce themselves; they fade into the background, making spaces more fluid, inclusive, and resilient.
And in our own work, we’re applying these loops to strategy, design, and delivery—using AI not just to imagine possible futures, but to test, refine, and build them faster.
Field Intel: AI in Spaces, Not Just Screens
AI is influencing environments across industries, turning static systems into adaptive ones. Here’s what’s happening across sectors:
Sports / Stadiums – Smarter Fan Flow
What the reports say: Fans want more than big screens; they want digital experiences that feel alive and personal (IBM). Meanwhile, “spatial AI” is being used to track how crowds move inside venues and adjust operations in real time (Outsight).
Breaking it down: “Spatial AI” = AI that uses sensors and cameras to understand movement in physical space. Think: redirecting fans to shorter lines, opening new gates when a section gets too crowded
Transportation – Predicting the Rush
What the reports say: Airlines and transit hubs are testing AI to forecast demand, manage staff, and smooth passenger experience (Forbes).
Breaking it down: Forecasting here isn’t about distant futures, it’s about the next hour. If security lines start building, AI flags it so extra staff can be moved before passengers feel the pinch.
Cultural Spaces – Access for Everyone
What the reports say: AI is being piloted to create real-time translation, captioning, and personalization in museums and theaters (Global Times, UNESCO).
Breaking it down: This means instead of renting a headset or waiting for a guided tour, you could pull out your phone and instantly see captions, translations, or even personalized exhibit highlights, no extra step needed.
Campuses – The Digital Operating System
What the reports say: Universities are leaning on AI for energy use, scheduling, and facility upkeep (Forbes).
Breaking it down: “Predictive maintenance” = fixing something before it breaks. Sensors track building systems (air, lighting, elevators) and AI flags problems early. A classroom that warms up right before students arrive, an elevator fixed before it fails. AI as the janitor you never see.
Zooming Out…
A recent conversation between Ezra Klein and Brian Eno (The New York Times) offered a gentle reminder that creativity is less about precision and more about drift and discovery. As AI seeps into how we design and manage physical environments, there’s a temptation to make everything frictionless — to automate, optimize, predict. But Eno’s point still holds: good design needs space to wander.
The goal isn’t to let AI take over the design process; it’s to let it stretch it. To use these tools not to eliminate uncertainty, but to explore it more deeply. If we let technology handle the repetitive and the rigid, we free people to do what they do best — notice patterns, chase hunches, and bring feeling back into form.
AI can make spaces adaptive. But it still takes human curiosity to make them alive.

Source: Noble archives
In The Lab: How Noble is Using AI Today
AI headlines are loud, but for us the impact shows up in the quieter places: scanning recent news for the next insight, surfacing old case studies, or spinning up quick prototypes. Think of it less as an agent layer across the Double Diamond — helping us discover, define, design, and deliver more efficiently. Somewhere along the way, we started calling it our “AI twin”: not the engineering kind (no turbines or factory models), but a set of helpers that shadow our design process day to day.
Here’s how it plays out across the workflow (always through secure instances, so we can work responsibly with IP-sensitive material):
Field Scanning
The flood of news (from smart campuses to cultural UX) never stops. AI helps us filter the noise, flag what matters, and turn it into the kind of intel you see in this newsletter.Past Research on Tap
Instead of digging through archives, we can query past work and surface best practices, diagrams, and insights to apply to new challenges. McKinsey estimates employees spend 1.8 hours a day (nearly a full workday per week) just searching for information they already have. Automating that step has already given us hours back.Everyday Helpers
Not everything we produce is flashy — a lot of studio work comes down to the basics: personas, research guides, specifications. AI gives us a head start on these artifacts, generating structured drafts we can refine. It’s less about reinventing the wheel and more about clearing the repetitive lift so the team can focus on tailoring the details.
Project Tracking
Workshops, brainstorms, and long email chains scatter easily. AI-generated action points pull the threads together into clean takeaways so projects stay on track.RFP & Proposal Support
We’re experimenting with agents trained on past proposals to act as a “second set of eyes.” They help us benchmark against prior work, catch blind spots, and draft more efficiently.Visual Imaging
Early concepting requires volume — lots of directions, fast. Working with our friends at SecretSauce, we’ve been using AI to generate quick variations and moodboards that help us test ideas early. It’s not about polished design, but about sparking conversation and deciding where to go deeper.Concept Support
From diagrams to flow models, AI can sketch structural ideas that help us see connections faster.Rapid Prototyping
For early tests, AI programming accelerates lightweight builds — whether it’s mapping an itinerary or mocking up a demo.

Source: Noble & Secret Sauce archives

Source: Noble & Secret Sauce archives
Project Spotlight: Greenpoint Waterfront

Source: Noble & Secret Sauce archives
In collaboration with SecretSauce, we supported Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park by creating AI-generated skyline renderings that visualized the impact of rapid development along the Greenpoint Waterfront. Developers often bring glossy visuals and campaigns, while community groups rarely have access to the same tools. By applying AI in the design phase, we helped level that field — amplifying community voices and sparking dialogue about equity, preservation, and the future of shared spaces.
Why it matters
Our AI twin isn’t flawless. Sometimes it misses nuance, or sketches feel a little off. But that’s the point; these helpers aren’t here to replace judgment or creativity. They’re here to clear the underbrush so we can focus on what matters: connecting dots across industries, imagining futures for cultural and corporate spaces, and building experiences that feel human first.
If there’s a lesson in Noble’s digital twin so far, it’s this: AI makes us faster at the repetitive parts, but it still takes people to decide what’s meaningful.
Events to Watch
AI isn’t the only thing reshaping how we design experiences. From smarter signage to adaptive environments, we’re seeing a shift away from one-off installations toward systems that learn, evolve, and last.
And on that note, some exciting news from our own team:

Designing for Impact: Planning for Long-Term Experiential Signage Success
Our very own Paul McConnell will be speaking at this upcoming event co-hosted by the Digital Signage Federation. The session explores how signage programs can move beyond “looking good” to becoming long-term assets: engaging audiences, adapting with environments, and aligning with operations over time.
📍 Location: TAD Offices, 246 W 38th St, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10018
📅 Date: Wednesday, October 15 | 5:00–8:00 PM ET
🔗 Register here
If you’re involved in branding, operations, or facility design, this is one to catch. Expect best practices, material choices, maintenance planning, and case studies on how strategic signage can deliver sustainable success.

Digital Signage Experience (DSE 2025)
We’re also excited that Hilary McVicker will be presenting at DSE in San Diego. Her session — “The Next Layer of Immersion: Interactivity, Adaptivity, and Connection” — digs into how emerging technologies are shaping experience design, with a showcase of work from Noble.
📍 Location: San Diego Convention Center
📅 Date: Tuesday, October 21 (part of the DSE program running Oct 19–21)
🔗 Join us at the show
Other Signals to Keep a Lookout
From campuses to airports to educational spaces, the fall calendar is stacked with events that show where digital–physical experiences are heading next:
Creative Tech New York 2025
October 15, 2025 – New York City
An event focused on the intersection of creativity and operations in design, media, and marketing. Expect panels, case studies, and deep dives into workflows, tools, and how to scale creative systems.
→ Details
Digital Signage Experience (DSE 2025)
October 19–21, 2025 – San Diego
The launchpad for the latest in signage and interactive display tech. Expect everything from AI-driven analytics to sustainability in large-scale installs.
→ Details
NVIDIA GTC AI Conference & Expo 2025
October 27-29, 2025 – Washington D.C.
NVIDIA’s flagship AI conference brings together experts in agentic AI, robotics, and physical AI with hands-on sessions and keynotes. A front-row seat to how AI is reshaping both infrastructure and experience.
→ Details
SEGD Wayfinding & Experiential Graphics
November 6, 2025 – Online
Hosted by SEGD, this one focuses on wayfinding and experiential graphics — with a mix of case studies, tools, and future strategies.
→ Details
ACI Annual Conference & Exhibition 2025
November 10–13, 2025 – Miami
The Airports Council International’s flagship event on passenger experience, infrastructure, and operations. Expect big conversations on AI, digital signage, and real-time wayfinding in complex environments.
→ Details
Looking Ahead
The story of AI in physical space isn’t about shiny features — it’s about adaptability. When environments learn and adjust in real time, they stop being static assets and start becoming living systems. For leaders, that means fewer surprises and clearer foresight. For staff, it means less firefighting and more focus. And for everyday people, it means places that feel seamless — not because they’re futuristic, but because they simply work.
Thanks for reading. If this sparked ideas, questions, or critiques, we’d love to hear from you. Noble is committed to partnering at a system level – if your organization is tackling similar challenges, we’d love to chat. From innovation sprints to full-scale implementations, we help translate big ideas into practical solutions.
Until next time,
Fadila and The Noble Team