Korea’s rapid social development and artificial environmental changes have highlighted the importance of public design. In response, the world’s first Public Design Promotion Act was enacted, introducing foundational public design education in primary and secondary schools to enhance public awareness. This study implemented and evaluated a pilot educational module at an elementary school selected through a national competition. A quantitative case study design targeted 82 fifth- and sixth-grade students at N Elementary School. Using a quasi-experimental field research design, the independent variable was the “ public design lesson content,” while the dependent variable was measured through changes in students’ awareness, assessed with a five-point Likert scale and analyzed using paired t-tests (p < 0.001). The module was structured around two theoretical frameworks: the Three-Element Body Theory, focusing on usability (upper limbs), mobility (lower limbs), and cognitive accessibility (vision), and the Three-Element Sustainability Theory, emphasizing circularity, symbiosis (biodiversity), and finiteness to promote harmony with ecosystems. Results indicated a statistically significant improvement in students’ awareness of public design, with an average score increase from 2.66 (SD = 1.08) before the lecture to 4.20 (SD = 0.81) after the lecture. Additionally, 95.1% of students reported positive changes in their awareness, and 47.5% indicated substantial improvement. The module also enhanced students’ understanding of multidimensional aspects, including environmental scale, type, function, urban diversity, and adaptability. The Three-Element Body Theory facilitated practical understanding of design and disability awareness, while the Three-Element Sustainability Theory deepened ecological and sustainability awareness. This pilot module validates public design education as an effective tool for fostering symbiotic thinking and creative problem-solving, providing a robust foundation for broader adoption and future educational development.

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Ceramics have developed alongside human civilization and remain a vital cultural heritage. However, due to their fragile physical properties, they are often discovered as fragmented shards. This study focuses particularly on ceramic fragments that were deliberately discarded for failing to meet the artistic standards of their time. As an innovative approach to restoring such damaged ceramics, this research introduces the concept of generative restoration. While conventional ceramic restoration emphasizes reproducing or preserving the original form, this study explores an alternative methodology that creatively interprets broken boundaries and assigns new design value to them. To achieve this, ceramic fragments excavated from traditional Korean kiln sites were collected and restored using 3D scanning and digital fabrication techniques. Inspired by biological wound-healing processes, a digital generative simulation was applied, enabling the fragmented sections to self-proliferation and form new organic structures. This approach aims to transcend the rigid frameworks of traditional ceramic restoration, proposing a hybrid restoration method that merges historical traces with contemporary technology. By investigating the intersection of traditional craftsmanship and digital techniques, this study suggests a new restoration method that elevates ceramic imperfection as an aesthetic element. Ultimately, it seeks to provoke a formative discourse on the convergence of seemingly opposing values.

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Lai Thai represents a key aspect of Thailand’s artistic and cultural identity, with its sophisticate patterns serving as a hallmark of the nation’s aesthetic heritage. Mastering this art form is a demanding discipline, however, and requires a deep and nuanced understanding of its extensive vocabulary of motifs and compositional principles. Consequently, the ability to create authentic Lai Thai has remained largely inaccessible to the general public, making it exceptionally challenging for new generations to learn and creatively engage with this vital component of cultural heritage. To address this challenge, we present LaiThaiGen, a framework that makes it easy for anyone, regardless of their artistic ability, to turn a simple line drawing into high-quality Lai Thai designs (a traditional Thai ornamental art form), while preserving their original structure and composition. Our contributions are (1) a high-quality dataset of Lai Thai images curated from publicly available sources, paired with synthetically generated badly drawn sketches (2) a diffusion-based approach to transform a simple sketch into a refined art that emulates the key characteristics of Lai Thai art form, allowing intuitive generation in Lai Thai style from minimal user input; and (3) Inception scores and qualitative results show that LaiThaiGen outperforms standard image-toimage translation methods in realism and artistic fidelity. We hope that our approach can help preserve the cultural heritage of Thai line art by simplifying the drawing process, making it accessible for a wider audience to explore and create authentic designs.

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