The session on Wednesday 21 October morning at Natlab brings together researchers, designers, and professionals to explore and debate how AI can open new opportunities to empower soft values in design. Soft values refer to individual and collective perception, experiences, behaviors, interactions related to emotions and cognition. The design of the built environment at all scales has large impact on people’s well-being, health, individual and collective perception, social dynamics. During the session, we debate the role of new computational techniques, such as sentiment analysis, knowledge graphs, affective computing, and human-centred predictive models, to enable the inclusion of subjective experiences and emotions in design workflows. The goal is not to replace designers, but to support designers, envisioning AI as a form of ‘co-intelligence’ that enriches the design process. The event fosters a positive impact on people’s well-being, health, social interactions in the built environment.
The Program
The program brings together perspectives from cognitive science, architecture, and computational design and is structured in two main parts. The first part features invited experts who present their research, insights, and concrete examples, offering complementary perspectives on the opportunities and challenges at the intersection of these fields. The second part shifts to an interactive panel discussion with the audience. Short interventions and elevator pitches introduce diverse, provocative viewpoints, opening new lines of discussion. The session fosters an open exchange between speakers and participants, promoting dialogue across disciplines.
