Reimagining Physical Product Design with Generative AI
Matt Hong
Senior Research Scientist
Future Product Innovation
Toyota Research Institute
Matt Klenk
Director
Future Product Innovation
Toyota Research Institute
February 26, 2026
4:30 – 5:20 P.M.
Sieg Building, room 134
GenAI technologies are fundamentally transforming creative work. For physical product design, startups and established companies have introduced a rapidly expanding array of creativity support tools that upend professional design practice from ideation to realization. In this talk, we will introduce how the Future Product Innovation team at Toyota Research Institute is taking advantage of this moment to holistically look at the physical design process and how promising new technologies may lead to outsized impacts on the business. We will introduce two projects: (1) Inkspire, which blends freehand sketching with analogical inspirations during early prototyping, and (2) Personagam, which enables designers to interact with a synthetic population to ideate potential design concepts. We will close the talk with a vision for what a virtual product development process with synthetic agents might enable.
About the presenters
Matt Klenk is the Director of the Future Product Innovation team at Toyota Research Institute. Over his career, Matt has led multi-organizational multidisciplinary research projects in cognitive systems, human-centered AI, and cyber-physical system design. Central to all of these projects is how to move AI systems from powerful tools to effective collaborators. Prior to working at TRI, Matt worked at Xerox PARC and the US Naval Research Laboratory and he holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Northwestern University.
Matt Hong is a Senior Research Scientist on the Future Product Innovation team at Toyota Research Institute. His research in Human-Centered AI combines structured design space exploration with AI-enabled multimodal interaction to augment early-stage product ideation and support informed decision-making in complex design workflows. Matt holds a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech.