This book presents selected research from ZEITGEIST 2026 on emerging developments in art, design, and architecture. It examines how cultural, technological, environmental, and social changes are influencing creative practice, spatial experience, and approaches to the built environment.

The contributions address sustainable and regenerative design, heritage and adaptive reuse, materiality and craft, digital and immersive environments, artificial intelligence, sensory experience, cultural expression, and socially responsive creative practice. Together, they explore relationships between culture and technology, heritage and innovation, spatial design and human experience, and the social and environmental dimensions of creative practice.

Drawing on perspectives from art, architecture, design, technology, and cultural studies, the book considers how creative disciplines are responding to contemporary changes and how these developments are shaping approaches to design, cultural production, and the built environment.

The volume is intended for researchers, practitioners, and students in architecture, art, design, heritage studies, and related fields interested in contemporary cultural, spatial, technological, and sensory approaches to creative practice.

Prof. (Dr.) Sanjay Gupta is the Founding Vice Chancellor of the World University of Design (WUD), with over three decades of experience in academia, research, design education and institutional leadership. An alumnus of IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad, he has held academic and leadership positions at IIT Delhi, NIFT Delhi, GD Goenka University and other leading institutions. At NIFT, Dr. Gupta played a significant role in advancing design as a mainstream field of higher education in India, strengthening research, international collaborations and technology-enabled design education. He subsequently established the School of Design at GD Goenka University and was instrumental in establishing WUD as India’s first university dedicated exclusively to art, architecture and design. He has an extensive research and publication record, including books published by Springer Nature, and has received several national honours for his contributions to research and education.
Professor Rowan Bailey is Strategic Lead for Research in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Huddersfield, where she also serves as REF Lead and Director of the Centre for Cultural Ecologies in Art, Design and Architecture. Her research specialises in place-based cultural development, with a particular focus on community co-creation through and across the arts and humanities. Her work explores how creative research can activate heritage sites, high streets and public spaces while fostering civic engagement, resilience, wellbeing and social connection. Professor Bailey is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Delivering Heritage / Post Office Cultures project, which explores the histories, cultures and futures of post offices in India and the UK through innovative applications of 3D laser scanning and creative digital documentation. The project brings together architectural heritage, education, cultural development and heritage tourism. She is also Principal Lead of the Creative Health Hub at the University of Huddersfield, further advancing interdisciplinary research connecting culture, place, participation and wellbeing.
Prof. Nic Clear is a registered architect, filmmaker, author, curator and Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom. With an academic career spanning the UK, Europe, North America and beyond, he has been at the forefront of critical and speculative architectural discourse. In 2015, he was appointed the inaugural Professor for Research in Visionary Cities at the Institute of Fine Arts, Vienna, a position funded by the City of Vienna. His internationally published writings, drawings, films and exhibitions explore architecture through image, narrative, speculation and curation, with a particular interest in visionary cities, science fiction and alternative forms of architectural representation. His practice combines architectural thinking with moving-image technologies and visual storytelling. He has also contributed extensively to architectural scholarship and publishing, including co-editing issues of Architecture Image Studies with Hyun Jun Park, with whom he collaborates under the name Clear+Park. His interdisciplinary practice continues to explore new ways of imagining, representing and communicating architectural and urban futures.