The Designing_AI Lab presents the results of its first semester at this year’s Rundgang at Universität der Künste Berlin.
„On the Other Hand“ summer semester 2026
Founded in March 2026, the Designing_AI Lab was introduced to the product design curriculum at UdK Berlin as a fourth studio, alongside development, social context, and interaction. Led by Prof. Aeneas Stankowski and research associate Lukas Henneberger, it focuses on design + artificial intelligence. In its first semester, it hosted the studio class „On the Other Hand.“ Located at the Berlin Open Lab, a joint research space of TU Berlin and UdK only a few steps from Product Design’s main building, the Designing_AI Lab is based at the intersection of both institutions‘ research infrastructure.
One of the workshops at the BOL houses the course’s main tool: an industrial robot arm, the Universal Robots UR5. Originally built for factory floors, the robot became the studio’s main tool. Students of the Designing_AI Lab were briefed to create a product, a process, or a workflow that focuses on working alongside it. A robot arm usually designed to take over tasks from humans or other machines should now become an active part of collaboration. The main question of the studio was: what can you and the robot do together that neither of you can do alone?
At this year’s Rundgang at Universität der Künste Berlin, the students presented the answers they had been working on over the past semester. Over the course of four months, the students were given insights on coding, critical thinking, and digital manufacturing by industry experts like Lena Weber, Threads&Tits, and Lidia Atanasova, broadening their knowledge in a peer teaching environment. The students teamed up into small research groups at the beginning of the semester, focusing on methods like object detection, controlling the robot by hand, or designing add-ons for the robot’s tool holder. This created opportunities for the Designing_AI Lab’s participants to specialize in different processes and methodologies they pursued further over the semester. Driven by additional input talks by Studio OE and Anna Zimmermann, who focus on a more hands-on approach in product design, the students‘ outcomes covered a broad field of collaborative applications for human-robot interaction.
For the Rundgang, the robot was moved from the Berlin Open Lab to Product Design’s main building at Straße des 17. Juni 118. Over the course of three days, the students presented and performed alongside the robot to visitors at UdK’s Open Door event. This demonstrated how the Lab brings artificial intelligence into academic teaching at UdK Berlin’s product design department. The Designing_AI Lab gives students and faculty a foundation to explore new forms of collaboration between humans and the industry.
The Designing_AI Lab
