Generative AI for Sustainable Design: A Case Study in Design Education Practices

The Sustainable Development Goals are currently the universal missions for all fields of engineering and design. However, many design problems in sustainable development are profoundly complex and nearly reach the limits of human capacity. This design challenge often involves a vast volume of data in social, economic, technological, and environmental factors. In response to this challenge, industrial and academic communities have devoted a large amount of effort in developing newtechnologies like artificial intelligence and applying them as new design tools. Generative AI is the latest advancement among these tools which can empower human designers with its capability to process massive data from diverse sources and recast them in a comprehensible form. Despite the heated discussion on the relationship between creative innovation and frontier technologies, little attention was focused on empowering the next generation of designers with the new skills in the AI era. This study hence conducted a two-week design workshop to explore the interactions between generative AI tools and novice designers.