What Three AIs Noticed in My Making Space

A Maker’s Space Reset — Part Two

There’s a particular kind of blindness that comes with a space you use every day. The jar of brushes that’s been balanced on the windowsill since autumn. The half-wound skein draped over the chair. The pile you step around without thinking. After a while you stop seeing them as clutter at all. They become the shape of the room.

That was the whole point of this experiment: to borrow a fresh pair of eyes (three of them, as it turns out) and see what they noticed that I’d stopped noticing.

If you missed the first post, A Maker’s Space Reset sets out the plan. I took the same photos of my creative space and gave them, with the same prompt, to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. I asked each one what was working, where the friction was, three changes that wouldn’t require buying anything, and one small thing I could do today.

This is what came back.

What each of them saw first

I was most curious about first impressions. What a person (or a program) notices first tells you a lot about what it thinks a room is for.

ChatGPT started with reassurance: “this does not look like a failed or unusable creative space.” It thought the room was simply being asked to do too many jobs at once. It noticed the bears and the candles and said, firmly, that they belong. Its reply was the longest and warmest of the three, and the most like a friend talking it through with you over a cup of tea.

Claude began with the bones of the room: the antique bureau, the wall of pigeonholes, the window. Then it named the problem plainly. The room is doing double duty as a studio and as household overflow. It also caught the small things: the old pet food boxes I’d turned into drawer dividers, the folder labelled “Ephemera”, and the cat trying to climb into the ephemera boxes.

Gemini was the quickest and most structured. It admired the secretary desk and my “plush creatures”, then moved briskly to a diagnosis, under headings like “Surface Contamination” and “Hidden/Buried Assets”. The advice was sound, but it read more like a workplace audit than a conversation.

To their credit, all three understood that this is a room where things get made. None of them suggested stripping it back to a white desk and a single succulent. They just stood at different distances from it. Gemini looked in from the doorway, while ChatGPT and Claude seemed to pull up a chair.

Where they agreed

Each of them, independently, landed on the same few things.

The first was the clothes. Every one of them wanted the pile of laundry that has quietly moved into the studio to go somewhere else. Clothing isn’t a crime. It’s just a different job sharing the same floor. Gemini and ChatGPT both guessed that moving it would make the room feel about 30% calmer, which is oddly specific and probably right.

The second was the fold-down desk. All three called it the most valuable thing in the room, and all three noticed it was buried. ChatGPT and Claude even reached for the same word: sacred. It’s the one piece of furniture built for sitting down and making, and lately it has been a shelf.

They also agreed about the boxes on the floor in front of the desk, which turn opening it into a small excavation every time. And all three pointed at the cupboard underneath as storage I’m not really using, mostly because I can’t reach it.

When all three spot the same thing, it’s probably real, even if I’ve been stepping around it for months.

Where they missed the point

I’d wondered whether any of them would reach straight for the shopping list: more containers, matching labels, a new shelving unit. To my relief, none of them did. Every suggestion worked with what’s already in the room, right down to Claude’s idea of using a spare towel or sheet as a photography backdrop.

Where they parted ways was over how tidy a maker’s space ought to be. Gemini suggested grouping supplies by colour in clear bins and keeping only one project tray out at a time. ChatGPT warned against exactly that. Sorting everything by colour, it said, is “the kind of organisation project that can consume an entire weekend and leave you with a beautifully sorted collection that you don’t actually enjoy using.”

They didn’t agree about the light, either. ChatGPT called the window “a major asset” with “beautiful natural light”. Claude said the heavy curtains were blocking most of it and suggested pulling them back during the day. Both can be true. The light is there. I just haven’t been letting it in.

This part matters to me. A making space isn’t meant to look finished. It holds things that are halfway along, and some of the mess is just the work happening. A tidy room that I can’t start in isn’t an improvement.

What surprised me

The observation that stopped me came at the very end of ChatGPT’s reply. It said I don’t seem to be someone who works on one neatly contained project at a time: “You’ve got materials, experiments, paper, tools, projects and ideas overlapping.” So rather than designing the room for someone who finishes one thing, packs it away and starts the next, it suggested designing it for “a person with several creative threads running simultaneously.”

I’d been treating that overlap as a failure of tidiness. It had never occurred to me that it might simply be how I work, and something to plan around.

Claude caught something smaller and kinder. It noticed I’d already turned old pet food boxes into drawer dividers, and called these “the instincts of someone who organizes well when given the chance — the system exists, it’s just currently buried.” That’s a lovely thing to be told about a messy room.

Holding the results up against what I wanted

Back in August I set myself a few quiet goals for this reset: make the space easier to start in, spend less time clearing surfaces before I begin, keep the tools I reach for close, give unfinished projects somewhere to pause, and keep the colour and texture without the overwhelm.

Between them, the three responses touched every one of those goals.

• Easier to start in. All three wanted the desk cleared before anything else. ChatGPT added a rule I like: when the desk is open, it’s for making, and when it’s closed, it’s storage and display.
• Tools close at hand. Claude suggested giving the rolling cart one job, holding only the current project, so it can follow the work (and the light) around the room. Gemini suggested hanging everyday tools on the little mint pegboard caddy I’d been underusing.
• A place for unfinished work to pause. This was ChatGPT’s best idea. It suggested three boxes I already own, each with one broad job: Current Project, Materials to Sort and Finished / To Photograph. Its reasoning was simple: “Your organisational system needs to be easier than throwing something on the floor.”
• Colour and texture without overwhelm. ChatGPT suggested “small islands of visual interest, rather than visual interest everywhere.” The bears work because they’re a deliberate little collection. A tray of beautiful materials looks the same way, while forty loose packets just look like unfinished sorting.

The one change I’m making this week

Each AI offered one small thing to do today, and on this they were almost word for word the same. Claude said to clear the fold-down surface and wipe it down: “Nothing else.” ChatGPT said to open the desk, clear just enough floor to sit down, wipe the surface, put one current project on it, “And stop.” Gemini’s version was to nest the stray boxes inside one another and slide them against the wall.

So that’s this week. The boxes go flat against the wall. The desk comes down and gets wiped. One project goes on it. Then I stop.

I’m starting small on purpose. A reset doesn’t have to happen in one weekend, and it doesn’t need a big reveal at the end. I’d rather make one change, live with it for a week or two, and see whether it actually makes it easier to sit down and begin.

What happens next

Over the coming weeks I’ll be testing a handful of these suggestions in the real space, with real projects on the table, and reporting back on what held up and what quietly slid back into the old patterns. (Some of it will. That’s okay. That’s information too.)

If you’ve ever asked an AI, or a friend, or a stranger, to look at your making space, I’d love to hear what they noticed. Sometimes the most useful thing someone else can do is point at the thing we’ve been stepping around for months.

With warmth,

Caroline
Editor & Maker,
Tasmanian Maker’s Journal