AI system turns hand-drawn sketches into website templates

"Our team has begun exploring methods to bring testing time to zero," says Benjamin Wilkins, a design technologist at Airbnb. One method his team is exploring is this software that scans of a hand drawn sketch of a website prototype and turns it into actual website code.

This system has already demonstrated massive potential. Weve experimented using the same technology to live-code prototypes from whiteboard drawings, to translate high fidelity mocks into component specifications for our engineers, and to translate production code into design files for iteration by our designers.

As the design systems movement gains steam and interfaces become more standardized, we believe that artificial intelligence assisted design and development will be baked into the next generation of tooling. Were excited to share our work with the broader community of designers and developers that are exploring this emerging field and to see where this leads. Stay tuned for future updates as we continue to experiment and build. In next post of the series, Design Tools Manager Lucas Smith will dive into some of the research and literature that informs our approach.

Image: Airbnb Design