Highlights DesignHighlights Design

For the first time, three graduates from ZHdK’s Department of Design won the ‘Punch Prize’ 2024 – an initiative between REFRESH Festival and Swissnex in Boston and New York. The ‘Punch Prize’ honours outstanding graduation projects that innovatively address issues of environmental sustainability, the climate crisis and the complex relationships between humans, nature and more-than-human.

During Climate Week in September 2024, the three award-winning projects ('More Moor', ‘Corralum’, ‘In Full Bloom’) were presented to an international audience at the Swissnex ‘Climate Ring’ initiative in New York.  All three projects share a discursive examination of the fragile balance between humans and nature. In their design practice, the graduates delved deeply into complex ecological issues and translated their research into interactive and multisensory experiences as well as concrete design solutions.

Since then, ZHdK’s participation at Climate Week New York has successfully been institutionalised and is part of a broader effort to position ZHdK internationally as a leading institution in arts & technology.

In line with ZHdK’s broader ambition to further cooperation with the Global South, the Design Department has been seeking to establish closer ties with universities from the region. From September 2024 to February 2025, Sociologist and lecturer in Trends & Identity, Francis Müller, spent a research semester at the design school of Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago de Chile. Besides teaching, he was revising his monograph ‘Design Ethnography’ and preparing for its forthcoming publication in Spanish in spring 2026. As part of this cooperation, there are plans for joint research projects in the context of design and health.