A fundamental challenge in design research today is to define the design programs that suggest how we can turn our days scientific knowledge and technical development into design for new forms of living that will provide foundations for a more sustainable way of life. Through a cross-disciplinary and cross-national network in architecture, textiles and interaction design the consortium will build and train a new research community to take on this challenge in practice based design research from a broader perspective, in collaboration between academia and the private sector, combining areas of design where Europe by tradition have a very strong position. The proposed ArcInTex ETN aims to strengthen the foundations of design for new forms of more sustainable ways of living by connecting architecture, textiles and interaction design in a training network for Early stage researchers. Deepening connections between textile, architectural and interaction design will open up for new reflective foundations of the design for living in an age of technological innovations, designing for adaptive and responsive environments connecting the scales of the body, the interior and the building. By a combination of in depth specialization, collaborative project work training and company internship, the ESRs of the network will form a highly trained avant-garde ready to take on fundamental challenges both in academia and in the private sector building their work practice on new ideas of material thinking and design thinking with emphasis on sensitive design expressions for reflective living. By strong focus on practice based design research the ETN will contribute to further establish design research at a level similar to that of engineering science in areas of special importance for the design of our future ways of living, which is crusial for academia and private sector collaboration in the given areas of design research.

SPOTLIGHT’s key objective is to develop and validate a photonic device and chemical process concept for the sunlight-powered conversion of CO2 and green H2 to the chemical fuel methane (CH4, Sabatier process), and to carbon monoxide (CO, reverse water gas shift process) as starting material for production of the chemical fuel methanol (CH3OH). Both CH4 and CH3OH are compatible with our current infrastructure, and suited for multiple applications such as car fuel, energy storage, and starting material for the production of valuable chemicals. SPOTLIGHT’s photonic device will comprise a transparent flow reactor, optimized for light incoupling in the catalyst bed. Furthermore, it will comprise secondary solar optics to concentrate natural sunlight and project it onto the reactor, and an energy efficient LED light source to ensure continuous 24/7 operation. SPOTLIGHT’s catalysts will be plasmonic catalysts, capable of absorbing the entire solar spectrum. The space-time-yield achieved to date with these catalysts in the Sabatier and rWGS process are > 104 times higher than for conventional semiconductor catalysts. This makes the concept technically feasible for scale up without excessive land use, and makes it economically much more attractive because of strongly reduced capital expenditures. SPOTLIGHT’s photonic device and process concept are perfectly suited for CO2 sources up to 1 Mt p.a., which makes them complementary to existing large scale CCU processes. For the EU, we estimate that the annual CO2 reduction through use of SPOTLIGHT’s technology is maximized to 800 Mt, which is approximately 18% of the current annual total. This could generate an amount of CH4 produced in the EU which equals 14.5 EJ of energy, corresponding to 21% of the EU’s current annual energy use, and representing a value of € 393 bil. Ergo, SPOTLIGHT’s technology reduces the dependence of the EU on non-EU countries for its energy supply, and initiates a new multi-billion industry.