Laboratory tours and introduction to Design Science LABS-concept ca. 30 mins per tour.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being adopted across a wide range of design activities, from generative ideation to simulation and validation. At the same time, its integration is reshaping roles, skills and responsibilities within design practice. While many companies make frequent use of AI, it is not yet well integrated in company practice and processes with a great variation within and across companies.

 This interactive workshop invites researchers, practitioners, and educators to critically explore how AI is transforming design processes—what it enables, what it challenges, and how it alters the nature, sequencing, and interdependencies of design tasks.

This workshop kicks off with a short report of industrial practice that emerged out of a highly successful workshop at Design’26. This workshop will critically reflect on those findings and add further observations and map the current academic landscape against reported industrial practice.

The workshop aims to bridge research and practice by exploring how design processes can evolve while retaining human-centred creativity, judgment, and the ability to assess emerging design states. Ultimately, the session seeks to build a critical mass of researchers and practitioners interested in jointly exploring the future of design processes in industry, both theoretically and in practice

The objective of the workshop is to reflect on the origins of sustainable design and 
sustainable manufacturing. Consider the progression from Cleaner Production to beyond 
Sustainable Design. Discuss and share current research in the field with purpose to 
increase knowledge exchange and collaboration. While sharing our current research, we 
also aim to understand how current research efforts are addressing the contemporary 
challenges of advancing design and production for sustainability in industry and society.  

The workshop takes its point of departure from the DfS evolutionary framework (Ceschin et 
al., 2016) released exactly 10 years ago, examining how the landscape of DfS has 
transformed over time, how challenges of DfS are being addressed in the current 
landscape, and building a future narrative with actions for the upcoming 10 years.  

The target audience is scholars in the area of Sustainable Manufacturing and Design for 
Sustainability, and people with a general interest in sustainability.