Museum für Gestaltung
Ausstellungsstrasse 60

Lara Rodrigues Ristic and Antonia Siran - SUPSI

Nowadays, children grow up surrounded by screens and imagination often gets replaced with passive consumption. Storia explores how technology can instead nurture and bring back traditional hands-on play. It is a screen-free storytelling house that turns children’s toys into the main characters through real time AI narration. By combining play and education, Storia invites children to co-create stories with the goal of developing empathy, vocabulary, and imagination. The project explores how design can turn technology into a playful learning medium that nurtures curiosity and creativity with children.

Christoph Schneider - HSLU

This practice-based research thesis investigates an unconventional prototyping approach that integrates principles of Chindogu, bricolage, and tinkering. Through original prototypes and a one-day workshop with design students, it employs humor, low tech materials, and embodied engagement as interventions. Findings indicate that deliberate rule breaking and material-led interactions reduce creative inhibitions, make digital conventions visible, and accelerate decision making. The thesis contributes a transferable method and a set of design principles for Research through Design, including implications for education and early project stages.

Alessandro Tellini - HKB

Recrafting Vocational Ecologies investigates how vocational training in the Swiss construction sector shapes relationships between design, making, and sustainability. Drawing on actor-network theory, the project traces overlooked connections among policymakers, educators, and students, revealing how tacit knowledge and material practices circulate across these domains. It critically examines the public–private training system and reflects on how vocational education structures the production of construction knowledge.

Marta Piatti and Matteo dell’Agostino - SUPSI

NOVA is a research-based project exploring how accessible energy knowledge can ease eco-anxiety in youth. Asking “How might we make energy systems understandable and empowering for young people?”, the project blends expert interviews, co-design sessions and user testing. The result is an engaging cooperative serious game to help students understand the energy system with confidence and curiosity.

Boyun Choi - HGK

This project explores how ceramics, often limited to functional use in kitchens and bathrooms, can also create emotional and sensory experiences. Ceramics not only suggest cleanliness and safety but also carry warmth and tactility that bring calm and intimacy. By focusing on the bathroom as a sensory space, the project examines how textures can provide comfort and connection through daily rituals.

Laurin Schaffner - HKB

Hearing is fundamental to daily life, yet hearing loss affects around 1.3 million people in Switzerland; among those over 70, two out of three are affected. Its gradual onset often leads to denial, delayed help-seeking, and social withdrawal, while stigma, limited information, and financial barriers prevent many from using hearing aids. My research explores which design interventions could change attitudes and motivate timely action and positive adoption of hearing technologies among people over 60.

Chiara Torterolo - écal

MedGum is an applied research project exploring chewing gum as an effective drug delivery medium.
Chewing gum has recently been recognised by scientists and researchers as an advantageous alternative to traditional drug delivery methods such as pills, tablets and capsules. The focus of MedGum is showing how by applying a design approach, redesigning structure, shape, and composition of the gum, it can be possible to improve absorption speed and dynamics of active ingredients. The project developed four first tailor made Gum solutions, working with existing production lines, and medical researchers, opening a novel, design-driven approach to functional and medical chewing gums.

Janice Beck - HGK

This thesis reimagines graphic design through the lens of hacking – not as code-breaking, but as a curious, critical way of interacting with systems. Inspired by early hacker culture, it treats everything in design – tools, workflows, authorship, even identity – as a system that can be understood, questioned and subtly misused. Through a series of experiments, hacking becomes a method of exposing the hidden defaults that shape graphic design practice. Instead of polished solutions, these interventions serve as probes, revealing assumptions we rarely notice. The designer emerges not as a passive operator of systems, but as someone who reconfigures, resists and reclaims them.

Francesca Bergamini - écal

How do beforeandafter images contribute to binary thinking and polarization in our culture?
The curating of images and narratives in algorithm-driven echo chambers reinforces extremes over nuance, a dynamic that the before-and-after visual device both reflects and amplifies. In this workshop, participants will investigate the cultural power of before-and-after images by re-creating and subverting them. Through a hands-on activity using photos, texts, and AI-generated tools, they will collaboratively invent “durings”—the invisible and often manipulated in-betweens. The workshop encourages critical reflection on truth, visual storytelling, and how we construct or distort reality in the age of algorithms, to critically explore the missing middle—the “during” phase—that is often erased in transformation imagery, and reflect on the cultural implications of binary visual storytelling. This exercise encourage students to critically engage with transformation narratives in visual culture (especially photography), focusing on what is left out—the "during" or "between".

Lina Zoe Haube - head

This thesis examines the chorus girls’ dressing room in early 20th-century New York, roughly between 1905 and 1935, during the golden age of cabaret and burlesque.
Focusing on the FLINTA experience within this space, it analyzes how the architecture of the dressing room reflects the social and cultural conditions of the time. The dressing room is a hybrid space which blurs the lines of both public and private and workplace and domestic interior.
Because original architectural material from that period is almost impossible to access, the research works with the vast visual archive created by early Hollywood, a time when the dressing room became a site of fascination.
My work focuses on three short film clips from 1903-1904, depicting the same dressing room and analyzes it through drawing. Drawing serves as a method to slow down the image, to reconstruct the spatial logic and atmosphere of the room. The thesis is structured around five recurring objects that appear across the material:
Door
Light
Paravent
Mirror
Costumes
These objects form the core chapters of the research. Each becomes a vessel through which a specific topic is explored: modernization, access, flexibility, identity and transformation.
In the presentation, I will focus on how to build and clean up a research structure and narrative, using my topic only as an example.

Nathanael Boell - ZHdK Industrial Design

Currently, we need an average of 2.8 Earths to sustain our current level of consumption. Yet, we only have one.
Aesthetics of Care explores the question: How can I design everyday objects that encourage people to value, maintain, and repair their belongings? Objects that people want to keep and eventually pass on, rather than discard into obsolescence. Through product design, not only in terms of function but also intimacy, deep attention, and value, a design strategy is explored using a vacuum cleaner as a case study.

Amalia Gutmann - HSLU

Humanity’s food security and the global economy are at risk because their foundation – soil – is being severely damaged by modern agriculture. If nothing changes, this damage will worsen. Yet, the urgency of the problem is largely ignored. Since the Industrial Revolution, agriculture and society haven grown increasingly disconnected due to historical, political, economic, and social developments. Many have lost touch with earth and is vital role in life. Reconnecting people with agriculture and soil has the potential to positively shape attitudes and behavior, and this issue urgently needs public attention.
Achieving a paradigm shift in the relationship within the earth-agriculture-society network is vital. This master's thesis explores possible starting points for doing so.

Peter Ha - head

This thesis explores my relationship with the Rhône and Arve rivers in Geneva to understand my attraction to their confluence. More broadly, it examines how we can connect, re-connect, and remain connected with nature within built environments to foster deeper appreciation. I briefly make an incursion into the philosophy of technology to bring attention to how we view nature through interventions and inventions. The research combines case studies, interviews, and experiments through the lens of environmental aesthetics. The goal is to discover new ways of appreciating nature and to sense vitality even in non-biological entities.

Olivia Menezes, Yaroslava Shylyk, Kirill Kohl

War leaves toxic legacies long after explosions fade. Our research investigates heavy-metal contamination in post-conflict soils, where harm is real but evidence is fragmented, contested, and often invisible. We explore how design can operate within environmental uncertainty, developing sensing methods, interpretive tools, and ethical frameworks for working without complete truth.
This presentation introduces our material research and invites participants to confront invisible violence and incomplete knowing in our afternoon workshop.

Museum für Gestaltung
Ausstellungsstrasse 60

ZHdK Campus
Pfingstweidstrasse 96

Mehrspur Bar
Pfingstweidstrasse 96