The rapid development of Industry 4.0 expands industrial robots from isolated machines to collaborative agents. Recognizing this paradigm shift, design educators are increasingly aware of the need to prepare students for effectively engaging with emerging robotic technologies and shaping future human-robot collaboration (HRC) projects. However, systematic and structured resources to guide these student designers in approaching, conceptualizing, prototyping and implementing HRC remain scarce. This article introduces a novel HRC design toolkit tailored for student designers that incorporates industrial constraints, role assignment, and guided communication into a step-by-step design process. Evaluations with 13 student interaction designers showed that the proposed toolkit clarified task flows, facilitated more intuitive robot behaviors, and bridged the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical implementations. Based on participants’ feedback, we improved the toolkit with simpler visual aids and improved guidance, further lowering the threshold for creating collaborative tasks. Finally, we discussed the applications and contributions of this revised design toolkit to industrial robotics education.

Advancements in technology, methodologies and intelligence associated with Industry 4.0 have brought attention to the application of industrial robots in new fields. As we begin to design the new usage scenarios for industrial six-axis robots, there are gaps in design tools in the human-robot collaboration (HRC) field specially developed for interaction designers and students. We pursue generative and structured design tools that can expand the boundaries of the HRC community, attracting more people with a design background to participate in the development of HRC applications. We present the plan for a workshop for students without HRC design experience centred on creating a collaborative drawing as the theme, through the reflection activities to inform the potential form of HRC design tools in the education domain.

The design of programmed spatio-material environments can be conceptualized as providing new stimuli with which to rewire the human brain in the context of architectural design. The plasticity of the brain is now recognised by neuroscience -- the brain can be teased to inform, continually learn and restructure itself. As a driver for stimuli that rewire behavioural and cognitive patterns, a cognitive architecture 4EA approach is employed ('embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, affected') to inform the design of digitally manufactured and interactive prototype environments that become sensate machines. We introduce a 4EA design framework, combining approaches from computational architectural design, human-computer interaction and choreography, for the design of environments in which novel cognitive experiences arise from interaction between network components. A series of creative works from the Black Project is presented as case studies exemplifying our 4EA design framework, furthering investigations into how to collaboratively design, manufacture and choreograph sensate machines for rewiring cognition through creative engagement by performers and audience alike.

The field of architecture is radically being transformed by the esthetic potential of embedded sensor technologies and interaction. This demo presents an approach to spatial design that implements techniques of interactive (immersive, spatial) art, to produce architectural 'spaces' that are expressed through the medium of interaction. 'Trivet Fields' is one example from a series of soundspace works that introduce interactive art computing to architectural practice, providing a new platform for cross-disciplinary explorations in esthetics of space.