ISC Club Bern
Neubrückstrasse 10
CH–3012 Bern

EventFabrik Bern
Fabrikstrasse 12
CH-3012 Bern

Conference Organising Team

Stephanie Hankey, Co-founder and Executive Director of Tactical Tech

Digital technologies are often seen as solutions to social and ecological issues, or as intersecting with them. But they are also drivers of change. Design has a critical role to play in how these issues are made, solved, debated and addressed. Drawing on Tactical Tech’s work, this keynote explores how—and what comes next.

Moderation: Ariane Nicollier & Alessandro Tellini, HKB

Reto Riggs, HGK Basel

Following extensive research into contemporary climate science, climate politics and the scientific paradigms at play, “Reclaiming Climate Futures” is an experiment and an opportunity for dialogue about our collective futures. Immovable and unquestioned is the fact that Earth’s climate is undergoing an unprecedented upheaval. As climates begin migrating, so too do habitats: Plants, animals and peoples all are forced into new environments, living with unfamiliar neighbours. It then becomes imperative for the goal of peaceful, generous cohabitation, that we define these tumultuous futures in terms of care and kinship. Unfortunately the dominant devices for assessing such futures are restrictive, frightful inscriptions of apocalyptic futures: Climate graphics display burning hot globes and uninhabitable desert landscapes. At the same time, their scientific veneer effectively restricts possibilities for affecting such futures: Climate science inadvertently manifesting the very future they seek to prevent.

Diana Escalante, HEAD

How might game mechanics reframe architectural responses to emergencies? This research examines urgency as a spatial condition in which familiar environments become unstable and demand new forms of action. Rather than prescribing behaviour through fixed systems, games generate situations in which possibilities must be interpreted, negotiated, and discovered. The study analyses a range of game types—competitive, cooperative, and role-playing—to identify the mechanisms they use to structure action and decision-making. The aim is to explore how these mechanisms could take spatial forms and be applied to interior spaces.

Rafael Balle, HSLU

What if repair were a core design challenge, not an afterthought? Every year, the EU discards about 35 million tonnes of repairable products. New regulations require repairability, yet many SMEs lack the know-how and R&D budget to meet this requirement. At the same time, about 30% of devices brought to Lucerne's grassroots repair workshops cannot be fixed. The volunteers there hold years of knowledge about what breaks and why, an untapped resource to address this gap. This project explores four ways to connect that knowledge to design: a Repair Innovation Lab, “Design for Repair” in education, large-scale repair services, and repair as a social business model. The aim: repairable systems, not just products.

Janina Hess, ZHdK

How can we move from knowledge to action in the face of the climate crisis? Knowledge of the climate crisis’s causes and consequences is widespread, yet structural, socioeconomic, and psychological barriers can make climate-friendly behaviour more difficult. This master’s thesis explores how psychological barriers (Dragons of Inaction, Gifford, 2011) can be visualised and what potential illustrations hold for climate communication. As a design project, an analogue, illustrated publication is developed that both conveys the concept of the Dragons of Inaction and uses interactive elements to encourage self-reflection and action. The project is situated at the intersection of visual climate communication, environmental psychology, and illustration.

Jiawen Mei, HGK Basel

Today, we spend a large part of our lives at desktop computers, where the body has been quietly reduced to a narrow set of system inputs. My thesis calls this figure the “user's body” and argues that another body still lies beneath it. The project reimagines desktop interactions through a series of experiments, acknowledging the complexity of the human body and giving its rhythm, tacit knowledge, and expressiveness somewhere to go.

Chantal Hochuli, ECAL

This project examines how the visual language of UnknownmiX, an experimental electro-rock band active in Zurich from 1983 to 1993, developed alongside its music. Drawing on eight boxes preserved by singer Magda Vogel, the thesis reconstructs an undocumented history from record and cassette sleeves, photographs, correspondence, press material, slides and traces. The research centres on Hans-Rudolf Lutz, credited as “All Visuals”, whose work spans typography, imagery, layout and production. Rather than treating these materials as illustrations of the music, the thesis reads them as evidence of how UnknownmiX produced, circulated and negotiated its identity within Zurich’s music culture.

Luca Enrico Spallino & Francesco Salvatore, SUPSI

The project explores how intelligent systems can move from screen-based interaction to embodied experience through wildlife photography. Where every human act modifies the planet to fit us, adapting ourselves to the habitat marks the shift: the user enters as a guest, but hosts an intelligence on the body that helps them negotiate their place in the ecosystem. Three symbionts extend perception: an environmental unit captures and analyses sound, building knowledge of the place; a hand interface turns it into guidance via EMS; a neck device returns the photographer’s impact as a pulsation.

Marc Streit, Head of Arts and Creative Industries, Swissnex in Boston and New York

Amelie Isabel Schaeberle, ZHdK

The research project investigates how biases and power relations emerge in the digital sphere and are reinforced through the processing of data. It focuses in particular on inequalities related to gender and global power relations. Using image-forensic and cartographic methods, the project demonstrates how such biases are carried forward throughout the different stages of the data lifecycle, from collection and processing to dissemination. These processes can influence which forms of knowledge and which perspectives become visible in the digital sphere, with social consequences as they often reinforce existing structures. Through visual means, the project aims to demonstrate that digital technologies are not neutral and to identify where these processes can be questioned and transformed.

Alessia La Rocca, SUPSI

Every digital action silently feeds an algorithmic profile that shapes real-world opportunities without awareness or consent. Replica is an ecosystem that makes data visible and actionable. A dashboard reconstructs the algorithmic identity inferred from browsing behaviour, while Replica_ Mod 01, the first device in the system, is designed for digital workers and returns control through two physical interactions: injecting noise to become unclassifiable, or reinforcing chosen signals.

Akiba Zwick, HKB

Social justice movements have profoundly shaped how people around the world engage with humanitarian crises. In the age of social media, their tactics have shifted towards a distinctive use of digital platforms. Grassroots movements, in particular, can reach the public through social media in ways largely unavailable to more institutionalised organisations. The Global Sumud Flotilla’s late-summer 2025 mission illustrates this dynamic: its social media presence contributed to global media coverage and large-scale protests in many countries. Drawing on a comprehensive network of Instagram user interactions with the flotilla’s content during the period of their detention, spanning over 200’000 unique interactions, this project asks what these tactics are and which were successful in reaching audiences beyond the echo chamber.

Jorianne Daphné Freja Mikkelsen, HSLU

This thesis examines how Ivorian couture can become an autonomous engine of soft power. It argues that sartorial sovereignty requires combining domestic material heritage with full ownership of production. Through a quantitative analysis of 173 womenswear looks from Abidjan Fashion Week 2025, the thesis identifies a dominant Ivorian design language of power cuts, fluid fabrics, and material weight, translated into a speculative design matrix: the Skyline (administrative precision), the Ground (material culture), and the Ocean (avant-garde fluidity). Without adequate trade infrastructure, a physical retail presence, intellectual property protections, and state investment, this cultural capital risks being extracted and re-valued abroad rather than retained at home.

Evelyne Pfeffer, HKB

Traditional Swiss patterns are often seen as expressions of national identity. However, their history is shaped by global trade networks, cultural appropriation and unequal power relations. The history of the Swiss textile industry reveals how designs from outside Europe were adopted, reinterpreted and commercially exploited, often without regard for their cultural origins or meanings. In this process, mechanisms of exoticisation shape how patterns are perceived by removing them from their original contexts and assigning them new cultural and economic meanings.
Drawing on a critical reflection of my own design practice, I question the construction of "Swissness" and examine how historical and global entanglements have shaped traditional Swiss patterns, as well as the implications for contemporary design practice. At the heart of this research is the potential of cultural hybridity as a reflective design approach in Swiss textile design. Using Research through Design, this project explores how an engagement with cultural origins, meanings and appropriation can inform concrete design decisions. The aim is to develop practical reflection criteria that support a more conscious and responsible approach to cultural references in textile design.

Lee Ehrat, ECAL

Scented candles, “glacial” serums, meditation apps, and branded retreats: wellness has become a multi-billion-dollar fixture of contemporary design. Beneath this polished surface lies a paradox. Practices now used for corporate optimisation and individual performance originated as radical, anti-capitalist critiques of industrial modernity. What is now a market for private escapes was once a vision of collective liberation. This thesis traces that shift, from wellness as a radical ethos to one of the 21st century's most profitable, individualised markets, and asks what past movements can teach us about designing rest and wellbeing beyond material wealth.

Margaux Guillot, HEAD

My thesis emerged from my education in Design Studies and Fashion Studies. Fashion and Design participate in organising social life. Yet while Design is often framed as oriented towards problem-solving and the common good, Fashion is still frequently reduced to a consumerist industry, considered superficial and intrinsically capitalist. Why does Design today appear necessary, while Fashion must constantly justify its cultural and intellectual legitimacy? Through interviews and theoretical research, I explore how this hierarchy is produced by histories, institutions, education, and cultural representations. More broadly, this research questions how we collectively decide what deserves to be taken seriously.

Conference Organising Team