Conference Agenda

Cities pursuing systemic approaches to climate neutrality increasingly leverage bottom-up strategies to foster multi-stakeholder engagement, enabling societal and behavioural transformations. However, assessing their impact through conventional quantitative indicators alone fails to capture the complexity of change. Design for systemic climate transitions enables cities to build pluralistic understandings of impact through mutual and reflexive learning that cultivates collective intelligence and shared insights. In this study, we analyse the quantitative indicators, qualitative data and collective sensemaking from 53 European cities participating in the EU Mission Cities: findings show that collective sensemaking has become a key enabler of reflexive learning, allowing cities to surface tacit and cross-contextual knowledge. This study advances the understanding of multi-dimensional evaluations in systemic design and illustrates how cities leverage collective sensemaking to iteratively assess and improve interventions on multi-stakeholder engagement and citizens’ behavioural change within climate transitions.

Most assessments of technology impact occur only after its deployment, limiting the ability to address unintended social, cultural, and organizational effects. This paper introduces TechWork, a prospective and reflective tool for evaluating emerging technologies within existing work systems. Grounded in reflective practice tradition, socio-technical systems theory, and contemporary work design research, TechWork guides interdisciplinary teams through structured prompts and impact mappings to examine how their own design choices influence autonomy, skills, collaboration, and job demands. The tool was tested through design-education workshops in an architectural studio, applied to vernacular construction practices where embodied expertise and cultural knowledge are central to the work. Findings show that TechWork helps participants anticipate socio-technical trade-offs and revise technology or workflow decisions toward more impact-aware outcomes. The study demonstrates TechWork’s value as both a pedagogical instrument for prospective design thinking and a methodological framework for socio-technical innovation.

As the industry moves beyond the internal combustion engine, incumbent original equipment manufacturers (incumbent OEMs) need a systematic, experience perception-centred way to evaluate design. We introduce a Perceived Value Framework (PVF) derived from a 2015–2025 review that defines six dimensions: perceived functionality, performance, intelligence, aesthetics, brand, and sustainability, each linked to sensory indicators. These dimensions are mapped to the emotional design model’s visceral, behavioral, and reflective levels to connect first impressions, in-use experience, and long-term meaning. Comparative case analyses of four OEMs’ 2024–2025 products validate how these dimensions operate across distinct value orchestration and design transformation initiatives. Cross-case results reveal consistent patterns in value anchoring, prioritization, and layered orchestration. We contribute a compact indicator set and a repeatable routine for strategy reviews and competitive analysis, showing that effective positioning arises from deliberate value focus and informed trade-offs rather than feature accumulation, and we note implications and limits.

Industrial designers increasingly valorise pre-consumer waste through upcycling; yet face methodological ambiguities when applying Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for design decision-making. This paper critically examines barriers in using LCA to evaluate circular design strategies for industrial waste metals, plastics, and wood.

Through focused literature review of LCA studies and guidelines, this research identifies key methodological tensions: allocation approaches produce contradictory conclusions about upcycling benefits; system boundary definitions inconsistently classify upcycling activities; functional unit choices fundamentally alter comparative results; guideline selection (ISO, GHG Protocol, PEF) creates large variation in results; performance metrics remain application-dependent rather than operational.

Findings reveal when LCA provides reliable design guidance versus when methodological inconsistency undermines decision-making. Results demonstrate how perceived organisational risk from methodological uncertainty inhibits upcycling adoption. This analysis equips designers with critical understanding of LCA's applicability boundaries for evidence-based circular design in industrial contexts.

Design plays a key role in driving economic and organizational transformations. However, existing approaches face significant challenges in addressing the translation of cross-cultural needs, integrating diverse perspectives, and critically reassessing the role of design within the singular economic/efficiency paradigm, particularly regarding affective experiences assessment such as comfort. To address these, this study proposes a qualitative framework that incorporates multiple stakeholders and cross-cultural users into the design process, referred to as the Diversity-Co-Creation-Framework (DCF). Through four phases—Scanning, Framing, Mapping, and Deepening—the DCF combines tools such as semi-structured interviews and the Futures Triangle from foresight research to engage opinion leaders and cross-cultural users. Using comfort experience in intelligent cockpit design as an example and incorporating the participation of 20 KOLs/KOCs from 14 countries, the framework is empirically validated. This framework provides a theoretical basis for understanding the diverse roles of design and evaluating the mutual compatibility of affective experiences.