Interior Provocations #Synthetic: When Hospitality Becomes an Act of Assembly

The ninth Interior Provocations #Synthetic Symposium to be hosted at Pratt on November 6, 2026, asks a timely question: What happens when the spaces designed to welcome us are increasingly assembled from simulations, algorithms, replicated materials, and carefully constructed experiences?

Walk into almost any contemporary hotel, restaurant, or resort, and you enter a carefully constructed fiction. The marble may not be marble. The wood may be a printed surface. The view may be framed, edited, or digitally produced. The lighting has been calibrated to create a particular mood, the furniture positioned to choreograph movement and interaction, and the scent, sound, temperature, and even the pace at which a guest encounters the space may have been deliberately orchestrated. None of this necessarily makes the experience less real.

In hospitality, the constructed nature of an environment is often precisely the point. A restaurant transports diners to another place. A hotel lobby evokes a particular era or culture. A resort manufactures an atmosphere of escape. The guest arrives at a place assembled to feel like somewhere else—or perhaps like nowhere that has ever existed.

This is the territory explored by #Synthetic, the ninth Interior Provocations Symposium, taking place at Pratt Institute. The symposium asks what it means to understand the interior as fundamentally synthetic: not fake or artificial in a simplistic sense, but as something skilled in putting together. The idea comes from the oldest and most etymologically faithful meaning of synthetikos. An interior is synthetic because it is an assembly of disparate things—surfaces, objects, light, programs, bodies, technologies, histories—composed into a legible whole. For hospitality designers, this proposition is particularly resonant. Hospitality is, after all, the design of experience. And experience is almost always an act of composition.

↑ Historical Whig Rose pattern digital representation (left). Several deconstructed woven patterns, designed and recomposed from the historical Whig Rose pattern (right). Courtesy, Felicia Francine Dean & Benjamin Sechrest.

Designing the Feeling of Somewhere Else

Consider the familiar hotel lobby. It may contain a reception desk resembling a sculptural object, a bar referencing a neighborhood landmark, a patterned carpet subtly directing circulation, artwork selected to establish a sense of local identity, and lighting designed to transition guests from the street's brightness into a more intimate interior. Individually, these elements are relatively ordinary. Together, they create an atmosphere. That act of putting things together is what #Synthetic asks us to examine.

Who—or What—Designs the Hospitality Interior?

One of #Synthetic's three thematic strands, The Synthetic Designer (or Author), addresses one of the most consequential developments in contemporary design: artificial intelligence.

AI systems can now generate floor plans, produce photorealistic interiors, and propose spatial arrangements from text prompts. They do so by drawing upon enormous collections of existing human work. For hospitality, where brands and designers often work across hundreds of rooms, restaurants, properties, and locations, the implications are significant.

But the question is larger than whether AI can produce an attractive hotel room. What does authorship mean when the designer becomes one participant in an automated production system? Whose ideas are embedded in the data? What forms of knowledge are included—and excluded? What happens to the designer's labor? And is the resulting process collaboration, appropriation, or something else entirely?

These questions are not entirely new. Long before generative AI, designers relied on pattern books, architectural treatises, decorating manuals, trade literature, catalogs, standards, and other rule-based systems. Interior design has always involved collecting, adapting, repeating, and recombining existing knowledge. The difference today is that the system can begin to make the re-combinations itself. For hospitality, that distinction may become increasingly important as digital tools influence everything from concept development and visualization to customization and operational decision-making.

↑ Interiors Under Construction. Speculative Sectional drawing by Ria Bravo

The Hotel as Another World

The second #Synthetic theme, The Synthetic Environment, may feel immediately familiar to anyone who has spent time in hospitality.

Hospitality has its own significant history of these manufactured worlds. Themed restaurants, destination resorts, casinos, cruise ships, immersive attractions, and even conventional hotels routinely create environments designed to transport guests somewhere else. The experience of travel can be produced without actually traveling. This is particularly visible in restaurants. A guest might enter a room designed to suggest a Mediterranean courtyard, a period European café, a Japanese garden, or a futuristic landscape. The physical location remains unchanged, but the interior constructs another geographical, historical, or cultural reality.

The question #Synthetic raises is not simply whether these environments are convincing. It is what happens when an environment is deliberately constructed to produce a particular idea of elsewhere. What gets represented? What gets omitted? Whose version of a place becomes the one the guest encounters?

The synthetic environment can produce wonder and escape, but it can also expose the assumptions embedded in the design of those experiences.

When Marble Isn't Marble

The third theme, The Synthetic Surface, takes the inquiry down to the material scale.

Interior history is full of surfaces that pretend to be something else: trompe l'oeil, faux bois, faux marble, veneers, laminates, printed surfaces, and now digitally fabricated materials. Hospitality has long understood the power of such surfaces.

A material does not have to be expensive to communicate luxury. A surface does not have to be stone to produce the visual impression of stone. A printed or engineered material can provide the appearance of something rare while offering greater durability, consistency, or affordability. But these substitutions also expose cultural assumptions about value. Why does marble communicate luxury? Why does wood suggest warmth or authenticity? Why do certain surfaces signify craftsmanship while others suggest imitation? These are not merely questions of aesthetics. They are questions about class, taste, technology, economics, and cultural memory.

The synthetic surface allows designers to separate appearance from material reality—and, in doing so, to ask why we have historically attached value to one material rather than another. In an era when technology can reproduce almost any surface, the distinction between original and imitation becomes increasingly complicated.

↑ "Vibe Coating"(2026)  is an interactive design research and public art installation co-created by Suzanne Lettieri (assistant professor of architecture) and Michael Jefferson at Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP).

Hospitality and the Performance of Authenticity

This may be where #Synthetic becomes particularly relevant to hospitality today.

The industry has spent years pursuing "authenticity." Guests are promised local experiences, authentic materials, neighborhood connections, and spaces that feel unique rather than standardized. Yet authenticity itself is often designed. A hotel restaurant may source local objects, commission local artists, expose supposedly original building materials, and carefully compose an interior that communicates a sense of history. The result may be entirely genuine in its intentions yet highly constructed.

That tension is productive. The synthetic interior does not necessarily oppose authenticity. Instead, it asks us to reconsider what authenticity means when every environment is composed. Perhaps the more interesting question is not whether an interior is authentic, but what kind of reality it is constructing and how that reality is assembled.

What kind of reality is it constructing?

For hospitality designers, that invitation offers a useful provocation. A hotel is not simply a collection of rooms. A restaurant is not simply tables, chairs, lighting, and finishes. A resort is not simply a building in a landscape. Each is an assembled proposition about how people should feel, move, interact, remember, and imagine. That is what makes the synthetic interior so compelling. It reminds us that the most powerful hospitality experiences may not be those that conceal their construction, but those that make us curious about how they were put together because every interior tells a story.

The more interesting question may be: Who assembled it—and what does that assembly ask us to believe?

For more information, see interiorprovocations.org

 Header image: Interior Nooscope: Cartographies of AI in Interior Design maps how generative AI shapes the ways interiors are imagined, represented, and valued. Graphic by Rana Abudayyeh (2026), building on Matteo Pasquinelli and Vladan Joler, “The Nooscope Manifested: Artificial Intelligence as Instrument of Knowledge Extractivism” (2020), https://nooscope.ai.

Acknowledgment: Portions of this article were edited with the assistance of Claude, an AI assistant by Anthropic