The Smart Design Lab (SDL) at the Northumbria School of Design Arts and Creative Industries is focused on future smart products, services, and interconnected systems design, using cutting-edge smart technologies and innovative multidisciplinary research methods.

The SDL works with different organisations, businesses and discipline experts seeking to achieve smart design solutions to many real-world problems such as in innovative manufacturing, smart cities, sustainable urbanization and development.

Current research themes include crowdsourcing and crowdsensing for design and social innovation, generative design with GenAI for smart products, designing digital twins-based ecosystems for manufacturing and smart cities, design for emotion support and well-being intervention, personal digital twins and robotics for aging well and sustainable development, and design resilient smart socio-technical systems with TimeLLM, generative and cognitive digital twins.

The SDL is leading an international research initiative on “Sustainable urban and rural integration with AI and Big-data technologies”, which is funded by the Department of Business, Energy, Industrial and Strategy (BEIS) under the Newton Prize 2019 awards. The collaborative partners include the University of Southampton, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, and Northwestern A&F University of China.

The SDL is also leading an UK-China-BRI Countries Educational Partnership initiative on “Digital Twin-driven lifecycle smart product design and manufacturing for railway industry”, which is funded by British Council. The collaborative partners include Newcastle University, University of Huddersfield, University of Zagreb of Croatia, King Mongkut’s University of Technology North Bangkok (KMUTNB), Thailand, University of Electronic Science and Technology, and Southwest Jiaotong University.

The SDL is home for the Joint Design Innovation Lab between Northumbria University and Northwest Polytechnical University (NWPU) of China, closely linked to the Global Positive Design Initiative (GPDI) 

1. Co-Development of a 3.5+1 Curriculum in AI and Digital Twin in Smart System Design Technology (British Council)

2. Designing Smart Services for Sustainable Urbanization with Fused Big-Data Visualization and Interaction Techniques (British Council)

3. Developing a Grassroots Sustainable Futures Platform-Collective Participation in a Community-Based Cultural Organisation (British Academy)

4. Transforming Service Design and Big data Technologies into Sustainable Urbanisation  

5. Digital Twin-driven lifecycle smart product design and manufacturing for railway industry (British Council Project)

6. Digital Twin-Based Smart Transportation and Service System for Sustainable Development (British Council funded project 2023-2025)

7. A Digital Twin Platform of The Customer Journey for Future Advanced Services (EPSRC)

8. Building digital replicas of unpaid carers to better meet community needs

9. British Council  UK – Egypt Trans-National Education (TNE) Grants 2023-24: Project Title "Driving Digital Transformation: Collaborative Curriculum Design for Smart IoT Systems in UK-Egypt Transnational Education "

10. CACSUK Research Collaboration Seed Fund Project ” Exploring New Health Care Ideas in Particular for the Elderly ”

11. Computational Design For 3D Printed Upper Limb Prosthetic

12. Design for individual’s emotion regulation from a designer’s perspective

13. Emotion recognition from keystroke and mouse dynamics for bettering design teamwork performance and well-being