Owing to the cancellation of the exhibition and competition in Basel this year as a result of the pandemic situation, the Swiss Design Awards are staging an alternative programme entitled “Failure is not an Option?“. During the week of 14–18 September 2020 the Swiss Design Awards will broadcast conversations and live chat rooms that will be available to read, watch and comment on the blog.

The Federal Office of Culture has chosen the fashion designer Ida Gut, photographer Monique Jacot, and product designers Sarah Kueng and Lovis Caputo as the winners of this year’s Swiss Grand Award for Design.

Design is a kind of interface passing through our lived experience and everyday practices. Viewed in that light, design can very much be described as an anthropological discipline.

There are projects which only get better with time. Through serial commissions or extensive research, they develop into layered outcomes that are fascinating to follow. In this essay, I examine selected projects in which time played a particular role.

Implicated as it is in everyday life, design inevitably has to deal with day-to-day episodes like eating. Let’s trace this thread through the creations of some of the Swiss Design Award nominees and see how designers intervene in these often deeply rooted rituals, and adress global issues.

Documentary photography may depict a distant elsewhere; but it always represents our own gaze on it. Pictures of exotic worlds tell our story and reveal the nature of our relationship to others.

Designers are at different stages of their careers when they enter the Swiss Design Awards. While I had assumed the reasons for applying varied, it turns out they remain broadly the same at each career stage. What does this tell us about designers’ needs?

Diploma projects represented 20% of all entries to this year’s Swiss Design Award, and 16% of all nominations. Following the work of nominees Clio Hadjigeorgiou, Lora Sonney, and Martina Huynh, it becomes clear that the diploma project can be of pivotal importance in someone’s trajectory, but also that neither design nor education ever happens in a vacuum.

In future, there will be always a time before and after Covid-19. The big question that design asks is unchanged and yet is suddenly far more topical, namely: what role does design play in our society?