An article in the October 2026 issue of the Best of SL Magazine touches on some very important issues regarding the impact of AI in today’s home & decor market. While I am happy to see Scafall placed alongside creators I respect as traditional 3D artists, and touching on tensions that I have completely felt and now deliberately have to ignore in order to stay sane, this has prompted me to clarify and address the exact role AI has in Scafall’s pipeline, within the very real context of my creative process and recent chronic illness diagnosis.

Pre-Diagnosis

Being undiagnosed my whole life meant that I was 80% of the time juggling RL & SL through flares that did not only make my eyes itchy, swell, and give me the flu (to which I wrongly attributed to allergy), but also meant I suffered severe muscle pain at night and severe brain fog and fatigue during the day. A lot of the time, this meant that I was pushing through SL and RL with pure will-power and adrenaline while not being completely there.

If you don’t have the context, you can read the article I wrote in July.

The New Baseline

You and I are both meeting my new baseline for the first time. In the last 2 months, my recent diagnosis and treatment have allowed me to handle tasks in both RL and SL in such a way that would have never been possible prior. I am still learning my limitations (ie. because the medication works so well, I’m now fainting more in RL), but given the struggle I had in my past, this is a small detail that I hold with humour. I no longer need weeks of recovery time, because I’m no longer pushing my body through cumulative month-long flares.

The Creative Process

My process never starts with any plan, but always with one stubborn spark of which I build around. For the recent Jawhar set, it was the use of boucle in a standard contemporary silhouette; I did not know the colours nor boucle pattern I would use until after I realised the rug, nor the coffee table until I finished the rest of the collection.

These were the placeholder fabrics I used before I settled on the boucle pattern and colours which became totally clear after I fully realised the rug.

For the new mainstore, as all other Scafall builds, it started in SL with prim blocks, and to be honest, this was not the first design I came up with (the original was more of a contemporary museum, ready to be imported into SL), but upon rezzing the wings of the store, I hated the first idea, and knew I wanted the middle to feel open and airy. Above is the frame I was playing with until I felt the canopies were right. All I knew was I wanted a curve, and its supports needed to be tall. The “tail” only emerged after the canopies, and because I wanted the energy of the space to shoot back towards the sky, the pillars came after that.

The Subconscious

Our subconscious is largely made up of the cumulation of our environments and experiences, as well as the patterns of resolving (or not) these. If you want to know the thing a person dreams about, you can look at what they photograph, or in this case, build. I am drawn to the full experience of beauty, not just how it looks, but how it feels beyond the level of aesthetics; this extends to my buried memory, as well as my current ones. For example, House Kaizen’s floating steps were perhaps inspired by the feeling I have walking through Greenbelt Park next door; or maybe, the new mainstore courtyard was materialised through the unconscious memory of Federation Square in Melbourne, and Vivo City Rooftop in Singapore. Maybe, the ramp I decided on beside the entrance steps comes from the skate-friendliness of Barcelona, which is maybe the real reason why whenever I build something large, I’m always in my skates lol. Who knows, right? But everything is connected somehow.

Building Through Feeling (Intuition)

To be candid, at the beginning, I could never see myself as a 3D artist. It was Zaid (ex co-creator and ex-romantic partner of 10 years) that pushed me enough past the point where I could see the potential I had with it. Since he left, the shared experience of “play” through design I had with him slowly but surely began to manifest on its own, through my feelings. I learned very quickly that all my good design decisions require the delicate holding of emotion, and space enough to do that ie. the jug is curved enough when it feels right, the canopies are tall enough when they feel right. That means, I build all initial concepts with no references, and only use them to refine after, wherever my vision has gaps. All this to say, I have managed to find my own version of play, and the end result is hopefully felt.

The Role of AI

For me, the topic of AI is complex and nuanced. I believe our world introduces technologies too quickly and unfortunately, we are part of the first to experience this kind of shift where technology can participate in the creative process alongside us and the mass result is a collective monkey-mind. Largely unregulated, and massively shiny, this appeal can become a shortcut, rather than a journey. And so, while it can be a shortcut, or save time bridging gaps in skill, it can never replace the raw spontaneity of human emotion, and experience (for now). But when paired with an intentional human driver, the end result becomes an intentional collaboration. And so to me, the vast library that is AI, is more of a collaborator that needs a good-enough driver.

With all this said, I would like to formally address the exact role that AI has in the Scafall pipeline. Please click here to read the article.

This article was written by Gianna, unedited by AI.