Lab for AI and Sustainability in Art and Design
TRANSFORM
CONFERENCE ON AI, ART, DESIGN AND SOCIETY
24 – 27 September 2025
About KINDLAB
Be KIND, be active, be critical. We operate at the intersection of AI, sustainability and design in the widest sense.
At KINDLAB, we treat AI as a new material for design - one that can be shaped, questioned, and creatively explored. Rather than simply using AI tools, we help designers understand how these systems work, examine their limitations and biases, and develop a critical, creative perspective on AI technologies. Our approach is rooted in learning through making: students experiment with algorithms like sculptors working with clay, testing breaking points and discovering unexpected forms.
We believe designers have a unique role to play in an AI-shaped world. As professionals who think from human needs and contexts rather than technical functions, designers ask not just “What is possible?” but “What is meaningful?” and “For whom and in what context?” This perspective becomes crucial as AI increasingly permeates our daily lives.
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 (Campus Gestaltung) focus on sustainability, exploring where and how AI systems can be used in the design process in terms of environment, society, and economy.
Our shared infrastructure includes a cluster of 40 high-performance graphics processors accessible through any browser, ensuring all students have equal access to professional AI resources regardless of their hardware. This platform bridges the gap between ready-made AI tools and complex programming, allowing students to start without prior knowledge while enabling deeper exploration of AI systems.
At Campus Gestaltung, our interdisciplinary structure - with over 1000 students in architecture, intermedia design, interior design, fashion design, communication design, and jewelry and precious stones - creates unique opportunities for AI exploration. When students from different disciplines collaborate on AI projects, unexpected perspectives emerge that wouldn’t develop in pure tech labs.
The KINDLAB supports all faculty and students at Campus Gestaltung in integrating AI into their projects, from architects using AI for sustainability analyses to jewelry designers experimenting with generative forms. We help them navigate the latent spaces of AI - mapping the invisible landscapes between input and output, between prompt and result.
Our un/learn AI publication series reflects our pedagogical approach: before students can meaningfully use AI, they must unlearn many assumptions - that AI is intelligent, objective, or can replace creativity. Instead, they learn to see AI as highly complex statistical systems that compress and recombine patterns in data.
Through this critical engagement, we’re training not AI specialists but designers who can think critically and act creatively in an AI-shaped world - knowing when to use a language model and when human conversation is more important, how to work with image generators while understanding why hand drawings remain irreplaceable.