The Intelligent Innovation and Cognition Lab (IICL-Lab) is delighted to celebrate that Varisara Sungprasit’s internship research, titled “ADT: A Digital Card-based Toolkit for AI-augmented Design Thinking” , has been accepted for publication at DESIGN 2026 – The 19th International Design Conference, one of the key international forums for engineering and design research. The paper will appear in the conference proceedings and be presented at the event in Cavtat, Dubrovnik, Croatia, in May 2026. 

Varisara’s work, conducted within IICL-Lab under the supervision of Mingnan Lin and Dr. Yuan Yin,  presents ADT, a digital card-based toolkit designed to integrate AI into the Design Thinking process. A survey of 204 designers examined AI literacy, usage patterns, and adoption barriers. Results indicated uneven familiarity, with higher use in Prototyping and Testing stages. Key challenges included prompting, trust, ethics, and training gaps. ADT, thus, structures four professional roles across five design-thinking stages, providing reusable prompts, recommended AI tools, exemplar outputs, and ethical reminders to promote informed and responsible human–AI collaboration. 

DESIGN 2026 continues a long-running conference series that attracts researchers and practitioners from around the world and is known for its rigorous peer-review process. For the 2026 edition, the conference received more than 500 submissions, with an initial desk-review stage followed by detailed reviews, underscoring the competitiveness and visibility associated with having work accepted. 

Varisara’s publication at DESIGN 2026 not only showcases the originality and practical relevance of the ADT toolkit, but also highlights IICL-Lab’s commitment to empowering emerging researchers working at the intersection of AI, design methods, and human cognition. 

The lab warmly congratulates Varisara on this success!