Roland Früh

Awarded

Roland Früh

Various design mediation projects

Design mediation

Jury report

The Design Thinker
Roland Früh has an im­pres­sive track record. He was the first per­son in the his­tory of the Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Awards to sub­mit a dossier in the cat­e­gory of 'De­sign Ed­u­ca­tion' and win a prize for it - even though this cat­e­gory does not (as yet) exist. Thus he had to be as­signed to the 'Other' cat­e­gory. For whereas usu­ally only 'prac­ti­tion­ers', i.e. de­sign­ers, win this prize, Roland Früh was, as it were, the first 'de­sign thinker'.

The art his­to­rian was not only awarded for his courage, how­ever, but for his work car­ried out in the ser­vice of ap­plied art ed­u­ca­tion over the last four years. Roland Früh writes for var­i­ous pub­li­ca­tions, teaches de­sign his­tory at the ECAL and is the cu­ra­tor of var­i­ous ex­hi­bi­tions and events.

He is pre­dom­i­nantly in­ter­ested in graph­ics and book de­sign. Al­ready for his mas­ter's the­sis, he con­ducted re­search on Swiss book de­sign. Ex­hi­bi­tions such as 'Book De­sign in St. Gall' and '1946, 1947, 1948 – The For­got­ten Years of the Most Beau­ti­ful Swiss Books' at­test to his pro­found knowl­edge of and pas­sion for the sub­ject. The ex­hi­bi­tions are usu­ally the re­sult of co­op­er­a­tion with other prac­ti­tion­ers and thinkers from the graph­ics and de­sign scene. The pro­ject 'Sun­day Plea­sures', which has ap­peared in reg­u­lar in­ter­vals since 2006, was based on co­op­er­a­tion of a spe­cial kind – not di­rectly re­lated to de­sign. Cen­tred around the theme of Swiss cook­ing tra­di­tions, this se­ries of note­books was nev­er­the­less awarded a prize in 'The Most Beau­ti­ful Swiss Books' com­pe­ti­tion in 2009. Here too, Roland Früh came full cir­cle.

In his ex­hi­bi­tions, Roland Früh in­vari­ably at­taches great im­por­tance to ac­com­pa­ny­ing events. Thus ex­perts are reg­u­larly in­vited to shed light on spe­cific sub­jects or to give work­shops.

It re­mains to be said that per­haps Roland Früh was in part cho­sen for an award for his courage after all. Whereas art ed­u­ca­tion has been well es­tab­lished in Switzer­land for many years, the area of de­sign still has some way to go in many re­spects. Ed­u­ca­tion plays a very im­por­tant role in mak­ing Swiss de­sign vis­i­ble, how­ever. By award­ing this prize, the Fed­eral Of­fice of Cul­ture sends a sig­nal and takes a first step in the di­rec­tion of an ac­tu­ally long over­due recog­ni­tion of de­sign com­mu­ni­ca­tion.
Anna Niederhäuser  

Biography

Roland Früh
Born in
1981
Education
Art historian / publicist

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