Projects

The Regenerative Education Network is a teachers' network that legitimises and promotes teaching with and in nature.

The network creates space for collaboration and exchange on the topic of teaching outdoors. With monthly and analogue meetings, information and opportunities are with the help of organisations and experts made available. Sharing practical experience and knowledge supports teachers to teach regularly with with students in and with nature. Regeneration means an improved quality of life life for all involved, including nature. The goal is a critically thinking, self-efficient and sensitised generation of pupils who recognise the value of the natural environment and act accordingly. The revolution of regenerative education begins with networking!
Mentors: Meri Zirkelbach, Isabel Rosa Müggler Zumstein

Design strategies, recycling concepts and material research for circular mattresses

In Switzerland, there are no solutions for recycling mattresses. As a result, 500,000 to 1 million mattresses are incinerated every year.  The 2030 target of the Federal Office for the Environment aims for a circular material cycle of 75%, requiring bold action in the Swiss mattress industry.  Since over 80% of the product-related environmental impacts are determined in the design phase, this is the first place to start.
The practical master’s thesis experiments with material, manufacturing processes and service design scenarios. The work is iteratively developed in collaboration with the mattress manufacturer Roviva, other actors along the value chain and end consumers. The goal is to establish sustainable and recyclable mattress design guidelines in Switzerland and prove its feasibility with a mattress prototype.
Supported by: Matratzen-Allianz Schweiz, Roviva Roth & Cie und Ikea Stiftung Schweiz
Mentors: Isabel Rosa Müggler Zumstein, Klaus Marek, Jan-Christoph Zoels

In a future-oriented labour market, collaborations replace rigid forms of hierarchy. Social competence and self-organisation are gaining in importance. Preparing children for the demands of society is part of the educational mandate of schools, but school is often still dominated by externally guided static learning. In view of social transformation processes, however, there is a need for process-oriented forms of learning that children can actively participate in.
selma & mogli therefore stands for «motivating playful-explorative learning and integrating interactive design in a fun way». It opens up creative spaces and combines subject-specific and interdisciplinary competences. A co-creative concept development including documentation and a short film provide insight into the exemplary pilot project.

How can the value of used building components be maintained or even increased in order to render attractive reuse in architecture??

Building components principally lose their value after use which leads them to being scrapped, incinerated or landfilled. The roof tile, being very low priced, represents the major challenges of reuse: Despite its excellent properties it is not worth being reutilized due to additional financial, logistical and legal risks. This master’s thesis explores strategies for adding value to used building components through a case study with roof tiles and seeks opportunities for their scalability in
architecture.
Mentors: Meri Zirkelbach, Isabel Rosa Müggler Zumstein, Klaus Marek

Constant doubt about one's creative work, the fear of white paper, and the impression of having to compete with others working in design. Working too slowly, not enough and the feeling of not getting anywhere. These different aspects influence the way visual designers work unpleasantly. Self-doubt paralyzes one's own artistic work, which can develop into creative blockades. I intervene in this situation with a system of solution strategies and visual training. The result is illustrated solutions in the form of a blog, a social media presence and a digital workout that can help creative individuals in their creative work.
Mentors: Axel Vogelsang, Isabel Rosa Müggler Zumstein, Klaus Marek, Marcel Uhr,  Robert Bossart

Since industrialization, the question of microstructures and rhythms on the facade - of reduction or complexity - has been repeatedly discussed. With this in mind, the practical master's thesis "Clinker Play" explores process- and material-based strategies, and inquires how industrially produced microstructures can be laid out to create complexity and variation appealing to human perception. A modified clay cutter was used to simulate the strand-pressing process commonly used for clinker. Specific interventions were used to experimentally refine the materialization in a multi-layered manner.
Mentors: Isabel Rosa Müggler Zumstein, Jan Eckert

SOFTSPACE deals with the spatial and atmospheric use of textiles in architecture. The project mediates and communicates between people and space. The textile objects exert an atmospheric influence on the space allowing an interactive use and extending previous applications. Thus, new possibilities for the use and application of textiles in architecture are outlined.
Mentors: Isabel Rosa Müggler Zumstein, Jan Eckert

In the middle of the 19th century, Henry David Thoreau retreated for two years to a self-built cabin at Walden Lake in the US state of Massachusetts. He tried to find out whether a simple, spiritual life in nature could be realized without significant financial means in order to draw a counter-design to the capitalist lifestyle.
The book restages this classic of the simple life by using various graphic techniques and playing with the materiality of the book and offers a contemporary approach.

I’M MIGRANT is an interactive children’s book, where the reader embarks on a journey to escape from war and has to find the right path to a new home. True stories are translated metaphorically and merged into an educational digital book that aims to transmit the complexity of these experiences through an emphatic narration.
The story follows a family, a mother with two children, and their journey from a war-torn country to a European country. The reader’s role is to lead them through the right path to reach their goal, avoiding many dead ends. This project is inspired by the travel experiences that many Syrian refugees had to undertake. The story also contains elements of many other people’s journeys from different countries like Tibet, Eritrea and Somalia.

The work results in a job description as a material scout and addresses the hitherto unnoticed residual material bison wool, which is transferred into a new textile value chain.
Waste is generated in almost every production process. These are usually disposed of without being aware of their value. The work uncovers the great potential of supposedly worthless materials and uses the example of bison wool to show the potential for using this fiber as a textile raw material.

The work deals with the subject of violence through drawing and painting. The process-oriented project with an open-ended final result creates a personal visual world and thus represents a contribution to the confrontation with violence in our society. The piece is an author-driven work that has been conceived, among other things, for an exhibition situation.