Between social and sustainable: A collaborative wood upcycling design process integrating AI and mixed reality tools

The nature–culture divide, a longstanding conceptual separation between human beings and the natural environment, is increasingly challenged by the pressing need to address climate change. This urgency calls for design approaches that can synthesise social and sustainable aspects, creating environmental-user-centric solutions. Our study aimed to bridge this divide by exploring the integration of digital and human crafts, with a focus on wood upcycling furniture as a case study. It investigates the flow of design information, creating an interactive feedback loop between physical and digital domains. To ensure the workflow aligns with stakeholder needs, the study engages professionals interdisciplinarily, including designers, informaticists, and engineers, to collectively test and reflect on the process. The proposed pipeline was then compared with the collaborative pipeline that emerged, incorporating stakeholder perspective to refine the system design. The resulting workflow embraced 3D scanning, AI-driven design generation, VR user scenario simulation, and AR-assisted physical fabrication. The digital and physical furniture prototypes suggest new avenues for design informatics by synthesising objective mathematical decisions with subjective semiotic inputs. By exploring the integration of human and machine crafts in the co-creation process, the reflections contribute to sustainable urban and community construction (SDG 11), revealing potentials for scalability in architectural production.