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The Department of Design has adopted a new strategy in the shape of a ‘living document’. In addition to a focus on Sustainability/Ecology, Digitalisation, and Diversity, advancing the internationalisation of the department, both in teaching and research, has been identified as a clear priority. This includes supporting student and faculty exchanges, incorporating perspectives from the ‘Global South’ into the curriculum, and establishing a research cluster on ‘Global Design’.
 

Initiated by the Department of Design and the Immersive Arts Space of the Zurich University of the Arts, «REFRESH» is an interdisciplinary festival situated at the interface of Arts, Design and Technology. 
 
From 9 to 23 November 2023, the fifth edition of the festival took place. Under the headline «New Realities: Design – Arts – Technology», «REFRESH #5» covered the topics «Immersive Journalism», «Design Realities», «Worldbuilding», «Future Technologies» and «Design Ecologies», all of which reflect the spirit of the times, question the role of designers and artists in an increasingly digitalised world and address the search for a binding ethic in dealing with the flood of available data. Through keynotes, masterclasses, lab insights and exhibitions, the festival brought together designers, artists, researchers and experts from Switzerland and abroad to anticipate possible futures for the Design and the Arts. 
 
«REFRESH» is by now a well-established festival, which has led to several international collaborations, e.g. a partnership with HAU (Hebbel am Ufer) in Berlin, «REFRESH» x Fantoche with the Fantoche International Animation Film Festival, and the Punch Prize initiated together with Swissnex in Boston and New York. The next edition of «REFRESH» will take place in November 2025 at ZHdK.
 

In 2023, the international SNF funded research project ‘Interfacing the Ocean: Towards a Sea Change in Design’ was launched. The project sits at the interface of design and ecology and aims to shed light onto the pressing issue of the fundamental transformation of marine ecosystems caused by human activity and to carry this into contemporary design research. In closing this research gap, ‘Interfacing the Ocean’ seeks to develop alternative ways of intervening in and relating with the ocean and its intricate web of life.

The research project is spearheaded by Interaction Design but supported by international partners spanning various disciplines such as marine biology (Jordan Lab, Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior, Germany), anthropology (BLUE: More-than-Human Ethnographies of Oceans in Crisis, Aarhus University, Denmark), artistic research (TBA 21, Ocean Space, Venice, Italy), and cultural studies (University of Art and Design Linz, Austria). To initiate a sea change in design, local and situated cases studies will be carried out in underwater habitats in Corsica (France), Pula (Croatia), and Venice (Italy).