About the year 2007

About the year 2007

Competition

This year, 206 de­sign­ers par­tic­i­pated in the Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Com­pe­ti­tion 2007. In the two-stage jury process, the Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Com­mis­sion, under the chair­man­ship of Lorette Coen, and sup­ported by ex­perts, as­sessed in a first round the dossiers sub­mit­ted, and then in a sec­ond round the orig­i­nal work. Fol­low­ing the com­mis­sion‘s rec­om­men­da­tion, the Fed­eral Of­fice of Cul­ture re­warded 25 pro­jects of 31 de­sign­ers.
The win­ners have the choice be­tween the prize money of CHF 20‘000.--, and a six month stay in a stu­dio in Lon­don or New York, or a six month in­tern­ship with an in­ter­na­tion­ally renowned de­sign com­pany abroad. The in­tern­ships, in par­tic­u­lar, are an im­por­tant in­stru­ment in the sys­tem­atic ca­reer de­vel­op­ment and have al­ready en­abled some of the young de­sign­ers to work abroad on a long-term basis.
The pre­sent cat­a­logue is ap­pear­ing to ac­com­pany the ex­hi­bi­tion 'Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Grants 2007', which will take place this year at the 'Musée de de­sign et d'arts ap­pliqués con­tem­po­rains' (mudac) in Lau­sanne. In her con­tri­bu­tion to the cat­a­logue, Lorette Coen elu­ci­dates the ob­jec­tives set as well as the Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Com­mis­sion's cur­rent dis­cus­sion about the im­prove­ment of de­sign pro­mo­tion at the fed­eral level. At the same time, she men­tions the dif­fi­cul­ties that cur­rently have to be over­come in order to achieve the ob­jec­tives set. We are pleased to re­al­ize the new in­ten­tion to award prizes to dis­tin­guished Swiss de­sign­ers al­ready this year, on the oc­ca­sion of the ex­hi­bi­tion open­ing at the mudac. For the first time, and with a lot of cre­ativ­ity and com­mit­ment, this cat­a­logue has been de­signed by BON­BON (Diego Bon­tog­nali, Va­le­ria Bonin with Es­ther Rieser).
Apart from the award­ing of prizes, the cat­a­logue as well as the ex­hi­bi­tion is the most im­por­tant in­stru­ment in the fed­eral de­sign pro­mo­tion. Due to these in­stru­ments, the award win­ning works can be pre­sented to the gen­eral pub­lic.

Jury

Chair
Lorette Coen
commissaire indépendante, Lausanne

Members
Martin Leuthold
Textildesigner,
Art Director Jakob Schlaepfer, St. Gallen

François Rappo
graphiste et typographe, Lausanne

Annette Schindler
Kunstwissenschaftlerin,
Leiterin [plug.in], Basel

Christophe Marchand
Produktdesigner, Zürich

Secretary
Patrizia Crivelli, Kunsthistorikerin,
Leiterin Dienst Design, Bundesamt für Kultur, Bern

Experts
Sabine Dreher
Ausstellungsmacherin und Partnerin
von 'Liquid frontiers', Wien

Maurice Scheltens, photographer, Amsterdam

Libby Sellers, design curator, London