KAZERNE DESIGN AWARD 2025 nominees

From left tot right: Katharina Ammann, Ieva Valule, Daphna Isaacs Burggraaf, Kasia Łukaszuk, Dana Elmi Sarabi, Anne Ligtenberg, Lotte Schoots, Céleste Muir, Kiki Astner, Réiltín O’Hagan, Annemoon Geurts, Lilou Angelrath, Andrea Schreiber, Jules Péan, Jan Hoorntje. Photo Ruud Balk

Kazerne Design Award 2025 nominees

How is the young generation of designers shaping the perpetual transformation in this increasingly complex era? What are their dreams – or their fears – and how do they express them? Beautiful, useful and durable? Discover it in their striking works, diverse concepts, and engaged future scenarios. Tomorrow is shaped by the students of today.

 The Kazerne Design Award is a prize meant to encourage recent alumni from Design Academy Eindhoven. The jury grants the nominees with an exhibition and the winner with 5.000 euro, thanks to Rotary club Eindhoven-Soeterbeek.

 

Jury

Daphna Isaacs Burggraaf, part of the Daphna Laurens Duo aspires to find a combination between industrial design, applied art and fine art. They create characteristics products and objects with sophisticated combinations of shapes, materials and colors.

In her design studioAnne Ligtenberg explicitly chooses to work with subjects that contribute to our personal and/or social well-being. She is able to successfully translate and visualise complex issues into accessible designs.

Annemoon Geurts is the founder and creative director of the renowned design hub Kazerne where she, together with guest curators like Joseph Grima, Lidewij Edelkoort and Ilse Crawford, shows the meaning of design for the world of tomorrow.

Jan Hoorntje, former CEO of Polaroid, has a strong and successful background in brand building and a deep understanding of the power of design to transform businesses.

Winner

Antonia Vincenza Schreiber | Local Shit

When life gives you shit and emission, make a rock-solid plaster

Local shit is a response to two pressing environmental issues: the current nitrogen crisis caused by livestock industry, and the cement industry’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Surplus cow manure, locally dug clay and sand are mixed into a weatherproof, sustainable plaster suitable for architectural applications, like facades, in wet climates. A renewed use of an acient technique.

The installation showcases materials studies, feasibility studies and three possible flows of production on large scale, proving that the plaster may be a viable alternative to concrete. Sustainable, useful and feasible.

Driven by environmental, social and philosophical questions Antonia Vincenza Schreiber developed her personal approach of using design as a tool of changing perspective. Through in-depth research about traditions, crafts and natural resources, combined with hands-on experimentation, she challenges contemporary issues with a critical (and sometimes ironical) lens. Currently, she is pursuing a master’s degree in Spatial Planning in Palermo, Sicily, where she aims to apply her experimental and analytical approach on a broader scale.

Nominees

Katharina Ammann | The Solar Share

Sunlight as a source of growth: natural, stable and regenerative.

Every hour more solar energy reaches the earth, than the world uses in a year. The Solar Share is a production lab for the growth of spirulina, an algae rich in vitamins, minerals and proteins. The spirulina algae make use of photosynthesis: converting energy from sunlight into nutrients, thus ensuring its own continuous growth. By growing, harvesting, trading and consuming the algae, The Solar Share offers a different perspective on energy, economics and ecology, with sunlight as the basis for truly valuable growth: natural, stable and regenerative.

Graphic and spatial designer Katharina Ammann explores the influence of online culture on our society and humanity. Images, symbols and avatars from digital media and pop culture come together in immersive installations to provide a new perspective on technological innovation. For this installation, Kathatina Ammann collaborated with Disnovation.org, a collective that specializes in creating labs for unimagined futures.

Lilou Angelrath & Réiltín O’Hagan Mnemotope magazine – (re)organising publishing

Writing, sharing, publishing – let’s do this together

Mnemotope magazine provides a wide and welcoming platform for the brilliant stories that traditional literature often overlooks. There is no theme, nor restrictions on grammar, writing style, language or form, allowing submissions ranging from essays and poetry to transcribed voice notes. As a result, it holds an incredibly varied collection of written and visual arts from all over the world. The installation gives a glimpse into the making process of Mnemotope magazine, inviting visitors to dive into the world of the project. Their enthusiasm illustrates the transformative power of the collective that Mnemotope magazine supports. The project calls for a for a more dynamic and inclusive industry, fostering the transformative potential of collectivity.

Lilou Angelrath and Réiltín O’Hagan started Bog Bodies Press in their final year at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Through their practice, they seek to gather people around unbounded storytelling both on and off the page. They have published the work of over 265 people, most of them for the first time, and hosted over 1000 attendees at live storytelling events across 3 countries in their first 18 months. In 2024 the designers gained the René Smeets Award and an honorable mention at the International Design Awards, in 2025 they got nominated for a European Design Award.

Kasia Łukaszuk | The Trust Paradox

Can we build trust with ever smarter technologies?

Unlike human-human or human-animal trust, human-technology trust is new and evolving, and can be easily manipulated. The psychological video game The Trust Paradox explores the concept of trust between humans and advanced technologies. Based on the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which collaborating participants learn from their experiences, The Trust Paradox encourages players to critically examine their interactions with smart tech. The game challenges our sense of tech-trust in an age with ever-advancing AI and technologies.

Designer Kasia Łukaszuk explores the evolving relationship between humans and technology. Drawing from design, computer science, and sociology, her work investigates how technological systems shape — and are shaped by — people. With a human-centered approach, she creates thoughtful, engaging experiences that invite reflection, curiosity, and conversation.

Dana Elmi Sarabi | No Shoes on the Carpet

Reclaiming cultural heritage by turning pressure into pattern

Persian carpets are highly desired in European interiors, where they are treated as consumer goods: worn down, bleached and copied as monochromatic machine-made versions. This contrasts sharply with the carpets’ revered status in Iran and its diaspora. No Shoes on the Carpet reclaims cultural agency of the Persian carpets from a diasporic perspective, inviting participation in the tradition of carpet making as a form of storytelling despite lost techniques and limited resources. It empowers the continuation of this ancient practice by any means available, including improvised materials and methods, as an act of cultural survival. Using materials from shoes – mesh, leather and laces – the project subverts the shoe’s dominance in Western spaces, transforming it into a canvas. Inspired by traditional Iranian carpets with symmetrical garden motifs, these works present carpets not as symbols of victimhood, but as acts of resistance, creativity and resilience.

Dana Elmi Sarabi is a visual artist, designer and cultural researcher. She combines material experimentation, speculation and interdisciplinary research in critical installations and textile sculptures in public spaces. Embracing ambiguity and discourse, she challenges eurocentric perspectives, exposing underlying systems of power, value, and representation.

Kiki Astner | Tonne für Tonne

Yellow Pages for forest conservation across communities in Austria

Forests are the earth’s green lungs, as they absorb nearly 16 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. Unfortunately, this vital function has made forests into tradable assets for major greenhouse gas emitters. The logic: a ton of emissions can be easily offset by protecting or planting trees that naturally sequester a ton of carbon over a specific period. Kiki Astner critically examines the effectiveness of this ‘ton for ton’ method. She proposes an alternative conservation strategy based on scientific monitoring. In support of Austria’s approximately 140,000 small forest owners, she composed a ‘Yellow Pages’ book with contact details of people who can provide information on forest-related funding, education and counselling. Planned to be distributed through communities to act as an intermediary, it aims to foster a collective sense of decision-making through conversation.

Designer Kiki Astner explores how we engage with nature, drawing on storytelling and research to examine our relationship with resources and tradition. Collaborating with craftspeople, scientists, and conservationists, she uses design to translate complex knowledge into accessible narratives. The main driver of her work is to encourage reflection on the hidden stories behind materials and processes that shape our daily lives.

Céleste Muir | Precious Little Rocks

What beauty lies hidden in hazardous waste?

The jewelry from Precious Little Rocks shows the beauty that is found in glaze waste in ceramic ateliers. Designer Céleste Muir explores these creative spaces as if they were a mine. Instead of discarding potentially toxic glaze remnants, Céleste carefully unearths, cuts, polishes and categorizes them as contemporary gemstones.

Precious Little Rocks inverts our notion of ‘hazardous waste’ and celebrates its untapped potential, adorning jewels and other objects.

Céleste Muir is a French designer with a penchant for ceramics and jewelry. During her studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven, she explored mining methods as a way to uncover high-value qualities of materials. Convinced of the beauty existing materials, she creates new species of stone that are the fruit of encounters.

Jules Péan | New Rocks

From dust to stone

New Rocks are formed from sediments from inactive mines and quarries. Designer Jules Péan draws from craft to mimic geological processes such as crystallization, volcanic rock formation and erosion. The collection of rocks is made from industrial waste, such as leftover material from construction, natural binders such as mycelium, starch, and salt, and sediments from Luxembourg, including sandstone, dolomite, limestone and iron ore. The newly formed stones will eventually decompose back into sediment – as new rocks from old rocks.

Jules Péan is a multidisciplinary artist and designer. Combining material research, ecological processes and craft techniques, he transforms waste into new sustainable materials. He has participated in international exhibitions and residencies, in New York, Milan Design Week and Dutch Design Week. In 2025, he was named Young Talent during Material District Utrecht.

Lotte Schoots | I Spy…

Why copy nature, when imitation can be supernatural?

People love the looks of wood in interior design. Subsequently, the tradition of wood imitation painting has evolved to an enchanting craft. Why would we try to copy wood, when an imitation has the potential to be something else entirely?

In her unique process, Lotte Schoots adapted traditional wood imitation painting techniques to create gestures of knots and grains that are not found in nature. From layers of paint and varnish, occur depth and patterns as could-be imitations. Is it wood or is it gemstone?

Inspired by hidden treasures and trinkets in nature, Lotte Schoots looks for joy and wonder in the almost common: ordinary extraordinary. She examines the object’s potential, by playfully reimagining concepts, scale, materials and lifecycles. The resulting designs reveal unseen potential in most aesthetically pleasing ways.

THANKS
New House Gallery

Ieva Valule | Y’all got adHD

Who would not claim a disorder in an age of craze?

Y’all Got adHD explores the chaotic reality of InfoHuntress, a graphic designer self-diagnosed with ADHD. With the help of an ally named Freudly, she dives into a society obsessed with doom-scrolling and productivity. Together, they peel back the layers of a fever dream within the Cognitive Capitalism Company, an enterprise that turns life into a relentless game of maximisation and optimisation. The film invites viewers to see themselves in the caricatures formed by an algorithm that merges cultural symbols and psychological motifs. The narrative examines ADHD not as a personal pathology, but as a cultural marker, reflecting an era obsessed with efficiency.

Ieva Valule is a designer, tastemaker, and ‘digital pathology researcher’ working at the intersection of technology, wellness, and contemporary media. Her research looks at how self-optimization and productivity narratives shape how we see ourselves. With experience in advertising and digital storytelling, she gained insight into how networked media companies operate. This knowledge now fuels her critical and independent research. Her visual language is bold, satirical, and rooted in contemporary critique. She is committed to culturally relevant work that challenges and reframes dominant narratives.

Award Show
During the festive award show on May 13, the nominees presented their work live to the audience and jury. Moderator Jeroen Junte, journalist and founder of DesignDigger, praised the professionalism of their presentations: “The common ground is storytelling. Each project imagines a better future in its own unique way. By dreaming, speaking, and inviting others to join in, that future comes closer.”

Jury Report
The jury deliberation took longer than ever—an entire hour. “The bar was incredibly high,” said jury member Anne Ligtenberg. “All the nominees presented with courage and a strong voice.” In the end, it was the openness, applicability, and future potential of Local Shit that made the difference.

The jury consisted of designers Anne Ligtenberg (Bureau AM), Daphna Isaacs Burggraaf (Studio Daphna Laurens), Annemoon Geurts (Kazerne Foundation), and on behalf of the sponsor, Jan Hoorntje (Rotary Club Eindhoven-Soeterbeeck). They appreciated the diversity of disciplines and approaches: from solar energy to algorithms, from textiles and trust to design for neurodiversity.

 See for Yourself

The award show, including the presentations of all nominees, is available to watch on Kazerne’s YouTube channel. The exhibition free to visit at Kazerne through the end of September. For opening hours and address, click here.