San Francisco – July 7, 2026

Our Creative Industries Program Manager spoke with Claude Zellweger, Design Executive at Google, and Camille Blin, Head of Industrial & Design Programs at ECAL, about A Message From Tomorrow, the ECAL x Google exhibition at Milan Design Week 2026, a collaboration that began with an introduction by Swissnex.

You wake up, and the first thing you reach for is your phone. Good news, bad news, the weather, your route to work, the face of a friend you have not seen in months: most of your day passes through these devices. Around it have grown a thousand small rituals, most of them invisible to you by now, all of them shaped by the same rectangular form. What if you change the form? What if you can shape new rituals?

These were the questions behind A Message From Tomorrow, a collaborative exhibition by ECAL, the University of Art and Design Lausanne, and Google at Milan Design Week 2026. In a gallery on Via dell’Orso, in the historic Brera district, eighteen Master Product Design students from ECAL exhibited a collection of conceptual mobile devices developed in collaboration with Google’s Industrial Design team.

The class assignment that produced them did not ask for the next phone. It asked students to envision innovative hardware engaging with contemporary habits, designed around the human dimension of mobile technology rather than the constraints of the screen. What might shift, ECAL asked, if we approached our daily rituals with these devices as the starting point of design rather than its afterthought?

The collaboration began through an introduction via Swissnex in San Francisco. My predecessor, Alicia Rieckhoff, introduced Camille Blin, Head of ECAL’s Master Product Design programme, to Claude Zellweger, Director of Industrial Design at Google on a video call. Months later, the project took shape. By spring 2025, eighteen students were collaborating with Claude’s team at Google to explore, prototype and build new ideas. In spring 2026 Google and ECAL presented a body of work to show in Milan during the Design Week, and I asked Camille and Claude what had made the joint program a success.

The mutual interest came first. ECAL has long been part of how Google’s design team thinks about emerging practice. As Claude put it:

“Being a designer, you have ECAL on your radar. Among our design team, it’s one of the schools that people generally refer to as doing exceptional work. I went to ArtCenter Europe [in Switzerland], so since the inception of ECAL I’ve been aware of the institution and have always admired the work and the leadership.”

For Camille, the scale of Google was part of the appeal, but the value lay less in the brand than in the responsiveness of the team behind it.

“Google is obviously on everybody’s radar, yet we wanted to ensure that our students had the chance to collaborate directly with such a big design partner. What was super interesting for our students was to feel that even though Google is a massive institution, [Google’s industrial design team] was always open to being challenged, and to discovering a new path.”

What strikes me here is how clear each side was about what it wanted. Together they drafted a brief that allowed for a conceptual and speculative approach. Claude described Google’s desire for an “expansion of thinking,” a register of exploration that is difficult to reach inside a product roadmap. ECAL wanted a partner that would take student design studies seriously enough to feed it back into its own process.

The brief took shape across conversations between Claude, Camille, and a few of their colleagues. The framing they landed on was deliberately not about hardware. Claude explained it to me as follows:

“We wanted to frame it in a way that was open enough for the students to dig into behaviours we take for granted or are not seeing anymore, the ways we engage with technology that have become invisible to us. Why not turn it around and start with those behaviours and ask: can we change them, and create new rituals?”

If they had asked for the next iteration of existing devices, Claude noted, the thinking would have stayed inside the existing shape of the category. Asking about rituals opened the brief up.

“If we had told you, ‘Can you please help us design the next phone, earbuds, or watch,’ it would not have stirred the thinking as much. Being broader and more inspirational in the brief really helped us.”

The next decision was which tutor to bring into the classroom. Camille treated this as a strategic question rather than a logistical one. The way a tutor leads a studio, he noted, shapes what students produce as much as the brief itself. He chose Chris Kabel, a designer known for conceptual, exploratory work, precisely because the brief asked students to leave conventional approaches behind.

If I were to name what made this studio such a success, I would put my finger here. Many tech-and-design collaborations strain at the brief stage. Either the company wants something close to a product they can ship, or the school wants the freedom to ignore the company’s context entirely. “Rituals” held both. It stayed close enough to mobile computing to be useful to Google’s team, and far enough from any product roadmap to give students room to think.

Two Google designers, Selma Durand and Arthur Kenzo, travelled to Lausanne twice during the semester, once for the midterm and once for the final review. In between, the entire industrial design team at Google, dozens of designers, joined a virtual session to review the students’ work. Camille described the experience:

“It was a very funny moment when the entire Google design team logged on digitally to discover the students’ projects. It was an unusual setting for us, but getting feedback from such a large team was incredible. It was quite a crowd.”

Claude framed the same moment from the inside.

“Each student walked through their proposal while our team provided real-time feedback. Everyone benefited from this. We brought the wider team along on the reviews to provide feedback and to be inspired. The final results were super inspiring!”

The collaboration, in other words, was not a sponsored studio with a logo at the end. The wider Google team was treating the student work as a serious input to their own thinking. Camille noted that this kind of responsiveness from a corporate collaborator is rare:

“It’s not always the case that collaborators are so reactive. They were discovering the projects as the students were presenting, and yet they always had something deeply insightful to share. It was a great experience for the students.”

In other words, the value flowed in both directions. The Google team got access to a register of foresight and speculation that might be difficult to produce internally, and ECAL’s students got the kind of real professional feedback loop that most academic projects never reach.

ECAL was, as Camille put it, “born internationally in Milan.” Some thirty years ago, then-director Pierre Keller staged the school’s first international showcase at the Centro Svizzero in Milan, choosing, with a kind of pointed humour, to open with an exhibition of milking stools. The school has shown work in the city every year since. For the past decade, ECAL has occupied the same gallery in the Brera district during Fuorisalone, a moment when the historic district fills with temporary shows that visitors find their way through by guide.

For A Message From Tomorrow, Camille and his team made an early decision about the design of the exhibit space. They did not want the show to read as a smartphone store.

“The student projects had detailed user scenarios, and we wanted to make sure visitors would understand them. Presenting the show within our space in a very pop scenography allowed us to explain them while creating a joyful place, setting it apart from more traditional design shows.”

The Milan audience moves quickly. Fifteen minutes in a show is generous. Camille was honest that the projects that landed strongest were the ones whose ideas could be read at a glance. Two stood out to Camille and Claude.

The first, Totem by Paul Quentin, an industrial design student at ECAL, reshapes the phone into a wedge that doubles as a tabletop object. Many tools have been absorbed into the smartphone, the project notes, yet they remain constrained by the rigid slab form. Totem opens a second mode of use: resting on its side, it supports video calls, media viewing, and AI assistance; laid flat, its edge becomes a subtle notification interface. Claude commented:

“Totem captures the fact that every time we pick up our phone we get bombarded with all of it. Our dopamine-hunting instinct chases after everything, and we cannot help it. Having that duality in a product is something people really want.”

The second, EveryDayCarry by Mo Tong Yang, draws on the modular charms and keychain accessories that teenagers, particularly in Asia, hang from their bags. The phone, the project argues, has become a standardised, closed object that contains everything yet expresses little, its app-based interfaces obscuring intention through endless menus. Instead, EveryDayCarry proposes a new modality where every charm fulfills distinct hardware functions: speaker, microphone, camera, screen, keyboard. Users assemble the device they need by stacking components on a keychain, and the resulting object adapts to the day and identity of the person carrying it.

“The EveryDayCarry reminds me of the decentralisation of computing. For so many years the phone has sucked everything into it, and now we are imagining a future where things become more decentralised again. Wearables are doing that to some degree, and people are finding their way back to dedicated devices, point-and-shoot cameras, single-purpose objects. That reflects a real desire and something worth pursuing.”

What interests me about Claude’s response to these projects is how he read them back into patterns and trends the Google team is already watching: “Both [projects] reflect and accentuate behaviours and desires we are seeing.” The students’ speculative gestures gave Google’s team a new vocabulary to think with.

When I asked Claude what role Swissnex played in all this, his answer was generous and, I think, accurate:

“Swissnex was the glue here, or maybe more the fire starter. If I understand the mission correctly, this part of the mission is to connect the dots between Swiss design and Bay Area design.”

We connect partners, help spark ideas, and create the conditions for engagement. The work that follows belongs to them—that is the role of Swissnex.

Camille has now known Swissnex at two ends of the lifecycle. The ECAL exhibition on wind turbines came to San Francisco in 2023 as a finished show, a dissemination, a project arriving with its conclusions in hand. This collaboration with Google began at the other end, with an introduction. Two ways of sparking the same conversation between Swiss design and the Bay Area. “Maybe what’s to be discovered is a third collaboration, something in between.” Camille hypothesized.

Whatever shape a third collaboration takes, that conversation belongs to Camille and Claude, to ECAL and Google, and all our other partners. Our part, as Swissnex, is the one we played here, and the one we endeavor to play across our 2026 Creative Industries program: make the introductions that might catalyse the next reaction, then stand back, watching what develops.

A Message From Tomorrow is one answer to the question we keep returning to: how do creatives shape the technologies they work with, rather than simply adapt to them. Eighteen students built alternatives to the current paradigms of smart devices, exhibited them in Milan, and discussed them with the designers whose decisions shape consumer electronics. Google’s team came away with new directions worth pursuing, ECAL’s students came away with a real feedback loop most academic projects would rarely reach. As Claude put it:

“This sounds like a good way of doing things, and continuing down that route, making connections between Swiss design and Bay Area design.”

• Exhibition: A Message From Tomorrow, 21–25 April 2026, Spazio Orso 16, Via dell’Orso 16, Milan, as part of Milan Design Week 2026 / Fuorisalone.
• ECAL Master Product Design students: Lee Ehrat, Moritz Engel, Finn Helper Johnson, Gunnar Kähler, Gyuhan Park, Xose Lois Piñeira, Paul Quentin, Julia Siebert Cáceres, Hugo von Hofsten, Mo Tong Yang.
• Head of Programs: Camille Blin. Tutor: Chris Kabel. Artistic Deputy: Anthony Guex. Assistants: Yohanna Rieckhoff, Brice Tempier.
• Collaboration Partner: Google (Industrial Design team).
• Facilitating Partner: Swissnex in San Francisco.
• Photography: ECAL / Marvin Merkel.