Design Academy Eindhoven announces award winners 2025
The jury was impressed by the quality of all projects and selected the following winners:
- Ze Qiu (MA Critical Inquiry Lab) as the winner of the Gijs Bakker Award 2025
- Anna Zoe Hamm as the winner of the Melkweg Award 2025
- Karin Pinto as the winner of the René Smeets Award 2025
The winning projects received € 2,000 each and a trophy designed by DAE alumna Olga Flor in cooperation with EE Labels.
GIJS BAKKER AWARD 2025 (MASTER)
Winner Gijs Bakker Award 2025:
Ze Qiu - Who Stole the Sky?
Ze Qiu’s project addresses how the seduction of environmental protection narratives can greenwash imperialist politics, through the stories of herders in China’s Inner Mongolia. Through a grazing ban, these herders are forced to abandon their mode of subsistence under the banner of preventing desertification, yet their accounts tell different stories. Mixing on-site interviews and observations with footage gathered online, the resulting film contemplates the vertical struggle of narratives from above and below. The jury was impressed by the affective storytelling and how it evokes both the emotional pressure under narrative control and the seduction of counterspeculation. It challenged official ‘truths’ while at the same time not following the speculations blindly, instead honouring conspiring as a tactic to resist from the position of the scapegoat.
“Across arid lands, environmental change is often framed through two dominant colonial tropes: desertification and overgrazing. These enduring narratives routinely blame nomadic pastoralism for what are deemed ruined landscapes. Today, backed by the UN and other international bodies, the narratives serve as alibis for state encroachment into Indigenous territories and continue to shape how degradation is managed in dryland ecologies.
Set against a prolonged drought and grazing ban in Inner Mongolia, 'Who Stole the Sky?' is an experimental film that resists the universalising discourse of desertification. As sand-control projects and intensive land use spread, herder communities question how these interventions disrupt weather patterns and livelihoods. Using phone-based social media footage scaled to a towering screen, the film traces vanishing clouds, teetering fencelines and disrupted rains through a constellation of agents — herders, camels, spacecraft, rivers and planted vegetation — offering a layered, necessarily incomplete account of the slow violence unfolding across the steppe.”
HONOURABLE MENTION Gijs Bakker Award 2025:
Kai-Hsiang Wen - How to Catch the Fire Dragon
Nominees
A total of ten projects were nominated from the five Masters Departments. The other nominees were Gil Lima Monteverde with Atmospheres from Below, Floor Berkhout with born under thread, Ze Qiu with Who Stole the Sky?, Valdís Steinarsdóttir with A Contemporary Myth of Gold, Greed & E-Waste, Sara Ballout with Networks of Necessity, Céleste Zion with Uprising Canopy, Aleksandra Nazarova with Chronotopic Fractures, Derrick Crichlow with Donning a Fa(ça)de: The Kapsalon* Barber Chair, and Kai-Hsiang Wen with How to Catch the Fire Dragon.
RENÉ SMEETS AND MELKWEG AWARDS 2025 (BACHELOR)
Winner René Smeets Award 2025:
“Bruno is a communication device and radio designed for people living with dementia. Rooted in personal experience, this project explores how design can preserve emotional connection and dignity when language and memory begin to fade. Throughout his life, Karin's father was an avid radio collector. Even as dementia progressed, music and familiar languages remained a lifeline - a way to reach him, however briefly. Inspired by these moments, Bruno reimagines the traditional radio as a tool for both connection and self-agency. Bruno features a tactile, intuitive interface with one, large, inviting button.
It is designed to be used independently, encouraging daily rituals, personal control, and a sense of autonomy. Loved ones can send voice messages and curated playlists through a companion app, but it is the user who decides when to listen. The balance of care and independence is central to the design, The project emerged through conversations with caretakers, families, and dementia support groups, including the Dutch choir Forget Me Notes. Their stories revealed the profound impact of music and routine in maintaining a sense of self."
The jury highlighted the project’s direct response to a clearly articulated need of connection when living with dementia, recognising its immediate relevance within healthcare and society at large. Karin translated a personal experience into a well-researched and scalable prototype, marked by overarching and sensitive considerations, and supported by substantial collaborations. The work distinguished itself through its clarity of purpose, practical orientation, and the precision with which it navigates complex emotional dynamics. By offering an accessible, thoughtfully developed and implementation-ready device, the project makes a convincing case for design-led impact in care environments.
Nominees
The seven other nominated projects for the René Smeets Award were Iduna Snip with What's Burning? Campfire sharing sessions, Morgan Stayaert with Queer and Feminist Interventions for Martial Arts, Laurin Böhm with Flößern (in fluent), Philippe Gaud with LE LABO 1.0, Margaux Vaïana Guillot with Social Animal, Elie Seksig with Viens Glander! and Tijn Geerts with capitalism.io.
Winner Melkweg Award 2025:
Anna Zoe Hamm - Tenderlymilitant.exe: A Weapon Armoury for the Queer-Feminist Counter Apocalypse
Anna Zoe’s project articulates a subversive notion of care through a radical and refined material language, drawing from feminist and queer theory, without resorting to didacticism. The broom-weapon hybrid opens up a compelling semiotic field, informed by plant intelligence while turning domestic labour into a site of resistance. The jury was impressed by the coherence and exceptional level of craft across performance, glossary, archive, and sculptural elements, each contributing to a layered and expansive narrative. With its fusion of gaming aesthetics, biology, and politics, the project maintained precision and overarching strengths without falling into the trap of extractivism or reductionism, and projected potential across formats.
“This broom armoury is part of ‘Fairywar’: a wider project developing a soft militancy to counter the emotional impact of the patriarchy. This particular collection reimagines the broomstick as both a tool for care and resistance. Each broom draws from the militant potentials of the plant kingdom — organisms often seen as passive, yet evolved to enforce boundaries against predators that fail to listen. Their mechanisms of defence are reinterpreted and catalogued on a website, examining their supportive and strategic potential to demolish the patriarchy. Their activation draws on movement research from the broom’s historical links with female labour, the witch hunts and the resistance cultivated in martial arts. By combining fighting potential with care objects, the work challenges narrow ideas of weapons as purely violent, proposing care as a radical, nurturing force for emotional and social resistance.”
Nominees
The seven other nominated projects for the Melkweg Award were Moos Geene with Bank Robbery, Noam Hasak-Lowy with The Trashifesto, River Andrews with A World Forms in Whispers, Lucy Hodge-Sellers with Bat got your tongue?, Layla Junqueira Guertzenstein with Glass Memory, Jack Austin with The Floor is Lava, and Kirsty Soutar with Treasures of Mine.
RENE SMEETS AWARD
The René Smeets award recognises a Bachelor graduate with a high level of empathy whose project has grounding outside the academy and demonstrates a (potential) big impact on and in collaboration with society.
The jury were impressed by the level of determination across this year’s projects, many of which moved from concept to outcome with clarity and intention. The students demonstrated strong communicative abilities and reflective storytelling, presenting their processes with confidence and precision. The individuality of each proposal, shaped by distinct cultural perspectives without defaulting to claims of globalism, did not restrict them to a particular locality. The return to interlocal concerns gave the projects grounded, situated qualities, often oriented around conviviality in form, method, or ambition. The jury also observed a refreshing absence of default reliance on digital tools or AI, pointing instead to a hands-on, process-driven ethos that felt especially relevant within today’s design landscape and its possibilities of collaboration. Together, these graduates presented themselves as well-prepared, thoughtful professionals ready to engage with complexity across contexts.
RENE SMEETS AWARD NOMINEES 2025
