Designing the Context to Bring Technology Down to Earth: The 2026 DLX Workshop
이 글은 여기서 한국어로도 읽을 수 있습니다.
On July 22 and 23 at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), the University of Tokyo’s DLX Design Lab and UNIST’s Department of Design co-organized a workshop on technology adoption and appropriation. Arranged as part of the Digital Convergence Design Professional Training Program (DT) overseen by the Korea Institute of Design Promotion (KIDP), the event brought together a total of 24 students, from UNIST, Sungshin Women’s University and Hanseo University. DLX’s co-director Federico Trucchia and researcher Jenna Wang led the program from initial planning through on-site facilitation.
DLX, which stands for Design Led ‘X’, is a research lab under the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Industrial Science and experiments to bridge the gap between academic technology and everyday life from a design perspective. The workshop’s core methodology, “Treasure Hunting,” grows out of this mission. It pairs designers with scientists in teams, aiming to uncover how cutting-edge technologies that don’t yet have a defined use might connect with people’s lives. Through short and focused sprints, this methodology turns abstract data, materials, and technologies into tangible concepts and scenarios, building a bridge between the two.
The 2026 DLX Workshop was a chance to experience this way of working in a compressed form in just two days. This time, the University of Tokyo’s Sakai Lab that explores more sustainable concrete materials, and BIRL Lab that builds bio-inspired robotics provided the project themes. Of the six participating teams, three took on the concrete materials theme and the rest took on the robotics theme, exploring new designs and scenarios out of the technologies each lab builds.
Day 1: Starting from the worst idea
The first day of the workshop began lightly with a Marshmallow Challenge to build teamwork. Then, the tech interaction case studies and design challenge briefing that followed raised a rather profound question. Examining real-world cases like the Humane AI Pin, Google Glass, and the Apple AirTag — which became controversial for being misused — gave us a chance to rethink technology from multiple angles: ‘Is the interaction that technology makes possible truly culturally appropriate, and is it adding real value to our lives?’
The core design challenge was framed like this:
- what is the situation
- where someone
- is using something
- to perform an action
- that could not occur without this technology?
In particular, the question “What could not happen without this technology?” served as the core guiding principle throughout the two-day ideation process. Rather than simply proposing visually appealing forms or repackaging problems that existing solutions could already solve, we were tasked with carefully evaluate the broader implications of interactions between technology and diverse subjects such as humans, nature, architecture, and vegetation. Ultimately the process demanded a depth of responsibility when applying technology, moving beyond mere playfulness.
The afternoon’s idea-generation session began in a completely unexpected way. The first warm-up prompt was ‘Share your worst idea,’ and we were given only a few dozen seconds. It was disconcerting at first, but the artificial urgency turned out to be a brilliant device for drawing out wild, absurd ideas, as there was simply no time to second-guess whether an idea was unrealistic or lacked merit. Under the principle of ‘no judgment,’ the facilitators kept encouraging us that any idea at all was welcome. It was a way of pushing us to go past the boundaries we had drawn around our own thinking, and personally it was the most memorable part of the workshop.
For the ideation proper, we used topic cards and context cards. Each research theme came with five topic cards, such as a robot that mimics the movements of nature, a robot made of soft, pliable materials, and so on. To these we would randomly draw context cards bearing keywords such as ‘Blow,’ ‘Makeup,’ ‘Movement,’ and ‘Disposable,’ or wholly unrelated picture cards, forcing us to fuse the context the image evoked with the technology. This had the effect of pushing our usual thinking to places our heads could never have reached on their own.
After several rounds of brainstorming and sharing within our team, we mapped our ideas onto a 2×2 matrix and selected one through dot voting. Because an idea’s placement shifted depending on how we set the axes, discussing them became a way of clarifying the team’s point of view. As the phrase ‘go for the unicorn’ suggests, the aim was to find not the safe idea but the one at the far extreme of the matrix.
We developed the chosen idea straight into a scenario. Grounding the narrative through desk research, we spelled out the context as concretely as we could — ‘at school,’ ‘while driving.’ Then we moved the situation we had shaped onto a storyboard, drawing scene by scene who uses it, in what circumstances, and how, before sharing it with the other teams in the end-of-day presentation.
The key throughout this process was not explaining the technology itself, but weaving a story around the context in which it exists. Through active feedback and questions from others, we also spotted gaps we’d missed on our own, and possibilities from angles we hadn’t considered at all. And so a hectic but rewarding first day came to a close.
Day 2: Into a story you can touch
The second day was spent turning the vague concepts and scenarios from the previous day into tangible, interactive physical prototypes. Since we had to produce something in a short time, showing the core interaction mattered more than crafting a highly finished product. Materializing abstract concepts and visualizing interactions in just a few hours was intense and fast-paced, but paradoxically, the constant time pressure served as a great catalyst to keep the project moving forward without dragging.
The final presentation left us with a lasting memory. Setting aside the conventional PowerPoint format, it took the form of a 10-minute role-play using only the prototype and poster we had built ourselves. Staged like a real-life situation with audience participation encouraged, the presentation became the reenactment of a scene rather than a dry technical account, conveying the value of the technology as a story anyone could relate to.
The treasures we found
For readers who weren’t there, here are two of the six ideas that stood out:
MIYADO is a project that upcycles concrete debris from earthquakes and tsunamis into eco-friendly materials, turning coastal defense structures into new habitats for marine life. By grinding waste concrete from disasters into powder and then compressing and hardening it without adding any new cement, it cuts carbon emissions while producing curves, organic forms, and varied surface textures that are hard to achieve with conventional concrete. MIYADO puts this material’s exceptional formability to use, weaving small pieces of concrete together like fabric into a flexible mat and draping it over the flat, smooth surface of an existing breakwater. The gray seawalls that once simply shielded the city expand into a three-dimensional habitat where seaweed and shellfish can attach and live. Beyond simply recycling waste, the core of this project lies in realizing both coastal protection and marine ecosystem restoration through the unique possibilities of recycled concrete.
Wiggle Rewinder, which received the most votes from the participants, is an earthworm robot that breathes new life into land ravaged by wildfires and desertification. After a wildfire passes, the soil rapidly acidifies and its microbial ecosystem is wiped out, often taking up to a century to fully recover. Current methods struggle to deliver restorative matter deep underground, or to open passages for water, air, and nutrients to travel through. Wiggle Rewinder mimics an earthworm’s peristaltic motion to burrow through the soil on its own and carve out those paths. It is a technology for wildlife that has lost its habitat, as well as a tool for park rangers, conservation officers, and environmental monitors whose work centers on ecological restoration.
What made both outcomes meaningful was that, rather than simply bolting the technology onto an existing product, they advanced it in a direction where the very qualities of the technology made a new kind of situation possible. What impressed us most was that they did not stop at explaining what the technology does; they tied together the people and situations that need it — and the behavior that changes because of it — into a single coherent scenario.
Closing
Looking back, the teamwork itself was one of the lessons we could gain from this workshop. Even within a single team, students with different interests and expertise worked together — HCI, product design, HAI, HRI, service design, and more. Though we were working on the same theme and even the same idea, the attention of each person went different ways. Some looked first at the flow of interaction, some on form and feasibility, and some first sketched out the entire user journey. These varying perspectives naturally filled blind spots that an individual might have missed, and the process of understanding, persuading, and converging toward a shared direction was a valuable lesson in itself. Collaborating across the boundaries of our disciplines was, in the end, one of the greatest rewards this workshop left us with.
A two-day workshop was hardly enough to test every possibility there could be. The scenarios and prototypes are not finished works in themselves, but they mattered because they taught us the order of asking about the situation first, with the technology set out before us. As its name suggests, this process of using design to uncover the potential hidden within scientific and technological research was literally a treasure hunt. If technological research generates new possibilities, design explores the people, spaces, and social contexts that give those possibilities real meaning.
Getting to see how a technology inside a lab develops, through the design process, into an outcome of real and tangible value will be an important foundation for our studies and research to come.
Written by Jeongmoo Lee & Sungwon Ryoo, masters students at UNIST Design