AI x Design Copenhagen - 5th Edition
The Eco-Value Blueprint for Sustainable AI Workflows The AI × Design Copenhagen series by l x l - learning experience lab and IxDF - Interaction Design Foundation presents its 5th edition, on what digital and AI features cost to run, and what value they give back, while the design is still open to change. Every feature has a running cost that never shows on the screen. One AI prompt can use several times the energy of a standard web search. Data centres as a whole are projected to use close to 1,000 TWh of electricity in 2026, roughly what Japan uses in a year. Nobody chose that footprint on purpose. It adds up from many small decisions in design and product work, made at a point where the cost of each one was invisible. Most teams do not ignore it. The tools in the room have no place to show it. What this evening is about We are not arguing for a single direction. Some AI and digital features bring a lot of value, and others add weight for little in return. Environmental cost alone cannot tell you which is which, and neither can value alone. The evening is about holding both in view at once, so that the people who shape a service can make informed calls about how much it is used and what that use creates. That matters most in the design stage. Decisions about data, requests and compute are still easy to change there. Once they sit in the infrastructure, they are hard to reopen. Designers often do not own those decisions, but they can make the cost visible to the people who do, and that is where this session starts. Who this is for Service designers × Product designers × Product managers × Engineers Some of you have been at it twenty years, some for two. If you work on a digital service that uses AI, or plan to, you will have something to add at the table. What to expect Marius Barbuța opens with a short talk on bringing environmental cost and stakeholder value into the same conversation during design. He shares one way of doing that, the Eco-Value Digital Service B