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Home Assignments

Every applicant must complete the mandatory and an elective Home Assignment as part of the application process. These two projects form the core part of your conversation with the selection committee. For each project you also need to show your research and experiments alongside the final design. Detailed information on how to approach the assignments can be found below.

Mandatory:
 
The Sleepover
Design and build an experience that takes up space, that is safe yet gently unsettling, inviting people to perceive and interact with space differently — then inhabit it (ideally overnight), document, and improve. Through research, observation, and reflection (solo and/or with a guest), explore how conditions like light, sound, temperature, and material shape comfort, awareness, and learning. 

Elective: 

  1. The gift of time
    Design a story and a physical object that explores what it means to give someone time — not as a clock or a schedule, but as a meaningful experience. Through storytelling and design, make time visible, tangible, and shareable, showing how design can transform the way we perceive, value, and live time and can turn it into a gift.
  2. The secret
    Design an object that embodies and protects a human secret — something invisible yet deeply felt. Through observation, conversation, and care, translate trust and intimacy into form, creating a design that conceals without exposing and honours what is meant to remain unseen.
  3. Beyond animal food
    Redesign an everyday habit, object, or ritual to express empathy, diversity, and social justice. By observing how daily actions like eating or sharing connect to larger systems, create a design that turns routine behaviour into an act of awareness, inclusion, and positive social change.
  4. Boredom as a tool
    Design an experience or object that transforms boredom into creativity.
    By consciously allowing stillness and distraction-free time, observe what emerges in your thoughts and surroundings — then translate that awareness into a design that reveals boredom as a space for imagination, reflection, and new ideas. 
  5. Listening to the Broken, Dialogue with an object
    Choose a broken object that speaks to you and explore its relationship with the space around it. Through observation, play, and transformation, give the object a new role or meaning, revealing how repair and interaction can reshape both object and space. 

We recommend considering these 5 steps in creating the home assignments and your own work for your portfolio.

Mandatory assignment

Spaces shape how we think, feel, and behave. A narrow hallway can make us rush. An open field can make us breathe. A hidden corner can make us pause.

Elective Assignment

What if you could give someone time? 
Not a clock, not a reminder — but actual time. 
An hour to breathe. 
A day to remember. 
A moment to pause.

Elective Assignment

What if you could design a way to keep a secret?

Elective Assignment

Eating is more than survival — it’s a daily act filled with meaning: empathy, culture, justice, and care. Every bite tells a story about who we are and how we live together. What if design could reshape that story?

Elective Assignment

You reach for your phone. You scroll. You swipe. Noise fills every pause — yet silence still waits behind it. What if you stopped? What if you invited boredom in, and listened to what it wants to tell you?

Elective Assignment

Something in your surroundings is broken — a fragment of the past, forgotten or left behind. A cracked tile, a torn fabric, a chair missing a leg. Yet even in its silence, it still holds memory, function, and form. What if being broken could open up a new way of seeing space?

Terminology

Design: Design is a discipline of study and practice focused on the interaction between a person — a ‘user’— and the man-made environment, considering aesthetic, functional, contextual, cultural and societal considerations. As a formalised discipline, design is a modern construct. 

Process: Overall visual Documentation of all steps taken during the project from research, ideating, Prototyping, conclusions, Decision-making, making in 3D and the final result in the context of use 

Prototype: A product built swiftly to test ideas, which changes until it resembles the final product 

2D work: Two-dimensional work such as sketches on paper, photography, paintings etc. 

3D work: Three-dimensional work means spatial work (in three dimensions), so it is not flat like a drawing or made in a 3D computer program. Think of projects, objects and models that have volume, can be touched and felt, made of cardboard, clay, wood, metal, textiles, plastics, ceramics or other materials.