This showcase brings together four projects by bachelor’s and master’s students at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) on display at Assembly, the Swiss stage at Climate Week NYC from September 22-25, 2026. Spanning industrial and game design, the projects take on questions of material reuse, regional resilience, water and energy, and the everyday systems that shape how we consume.
The projects are winners of the REFRESH X Punch Prize, which recognizes outstanding diploma projects of the ZHdK Department of Design that innovatively deal with questions around ecological sustainability, the climate crisis and the complex entanglements between society, the environment and technology. The prize, now in its third year, exists as a result of the close exchange between REFRESH Festival and Swissnex in Boston and New York.
Join us for a guided tour of the exhibits, presentations by student designers, and the opportunity to connect with students, artists, and professionals developing creative approaches to climate change.
Coffee and snacks will be served.
Tooling to Regenerate
– Caja Peters
This project explores the intersection of craft and industry, reality and fiction, application and exploration, by focusing on the scaleability of regional regeneration through tool-making. Reconfiguring the representation of wool as a uniform resource, it proposes a shift in the perception of materials, from isolated resources to entangled matter.
RE:PACK
– Brendan Strickler
Big outdoor rucksacks often spend more time stored away at home than in the great outdoors. They are robust, long-lasting and complex to manufacture. Their environmental footprint bears no relation to their actual usage. «RE:PACK» provides a circular concept for the classic outdoor rucksack which includes a rental scheme and replaceable modules.
MoreNo Longer
– Yasmina Kupferschmid
«No Longer» explores the long-term potential of negotiating climate change and ecological sustainability in video games. Drawing on insights and strategies from climate communication, it intertwines emotional storytelling with strategically fast-paced and absurd actions at the gameplay level in this physics-based platformer, in order to create awareness of the impending climate collapse.
MoreWasserstand
– Tim Frei
The mountain huts of the Swiss Alpine Club are facing a shortage of drinking water: glaciers are vanishing, springs are drying up, and the hut keepers feel the strain of this serious loss. «Wasserstand» («Water Line») extracts 100 litres of drinking water from the air every day, so fewer guests need to be turned away.
MoreProgram
- 9:00am – Doors Open
- 9:30am – Welcome Remarks
- 9:40am – Presentation
- 9:55am – Exhibition Tour
- 10:15am – Reception
- 11:00am – End
iCal / Outlook
Event start time
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New York
9:00AM
Speakers
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Bio
Caja Peters
MA Industrial Design
Zurich University of the ArtsCaja Peters is a graduate of the MA Industrial Design program at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Her diploma project, “Tooling to Regenerate,” explores regional material resilience through a set of hand-built tools that work with, rather than against, the natural variance of wool. The project won the 2026 REFRESH × Punch Prize.
Assembly
This event is part of Assembly, the main Swiss stage at Climate Week NYC 2026. As world leaders gather in Midtown Manhattan, Swissnex assembles Swiss and global voices – from private sector innovators and researchers to artists and policymakers – in the East Village for three days of communal climate thinking and action. Assembly speaks to deliberation and democracy – the idea that communities must collectively define their futures – as well as the ongoing, creative, improvisational process of constructing those futures from the pieces of our present.
Partners
This event is presented by Swissnex in collaboration with the Department of Design of Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).
