Lab for AI and Sustainability in Art and Design

About KINDLAB

Be KIND, be active, be critical. We operate at the intersection of AI, sustainability and design in the widest sense.

We are a lab for research, teaching and practice. We are a lab for students, researchers, artists, designers, engineers, scientists, and everyone else who is interested in the topic. We are a lab for everyone who wants to be KIND.

Our partners and structure

KITeGG integrates the teaching of AI fundamentals, tools and methods into the education and training of designers in a sustainable way. This will enable them to use artificial intelligence as a material and tool for design in a reflective way.

The project is being carried out in a network of five art and design colleges, each with its own focus. KINDLAB and the Campus of Art and Design will focus on sustainability. The aim is to explore where and how AI systems can already be used in the design process in terms of sustainability (environment, society, economy).

For example, tools that provide information on efficiency (e.g. material optimisation), sufficiency (e.g. leasing concepts or digital products) and consistency (new materials, circular building materials) or enable new discoveries are conceivable and in some cases already in use. Students will be trained to apply this AI-based information to their design decisions in an ethical and environmentally responsible way. A sustainability and materials research laboratory will support theoretical teaching and enable the practical implementation of innovative material developments and the optimisation of existing production processes, taking into account new sustainability aspects and changing consumer needs. AI can be used as a creative tool to generate ideas and consider complex interrelationships in the design process.

A shared cloud-based infrastructure will be established for teaching and research. Each of the five universities will contribute a server component that can be used both as a high-performance cluster and by many students in parallel.

During the course of the project, the results will be presented at annual workshops and symposia, in order to contribute within and beyond the network to the overarching question of how creative educational perspectives on AI topics should be expanded to meet future challenges.