The Design Biennale Zurich

Switzerland's biennale of design, run from 2017 to 2025 in Zurich by the Verein Freundeskreis Design — an association initiated in 2015 by the product designers Gabriela Chicherio and Andreas Saxer to give the German-speaking design scene the kind of cultural-and-intellectual event the city had long lacked. The fifth and final edition, SIDE BY SIDE (5 – 14 September 2025), was staged at the Alter Botanischer Garten of the University of Zurich under Artistic Director Nina Paim and the Icelandic materials researcher Björn Steinar Blumenstein, with eleven new commissioned projects across the garden's pavilions. The Verein Freundeskreis Design has since announced that the biennale concludes with the 2025 edition; the institution's public-design-event work continues through the co-founded Zurich Design Weeks.

Active2017 — 20255 editions · concluded
The Alter Botanischer Garten of the University of Zurich at Pelikanstrasse 40 — the principal venue of the Design Biennale Zurich since its second edition in 2019.
Above The Alter Botanischer Garten of the University of Zurich — the nineteenth-century botanical garden at Pelikanstrasse 40, with its 1877 Schoch palm house — has been the principal venue of the Design Biennale Zurich across its second edition (PLAY, 2019), third (CLASH, 2021), fourth (SHIFT, 2023) and fifth (SIDE BY SIDE, 2025).

The Lead Essay The 5th Design Biennale Zurich

Paim and Blumenstein's SIDE BY SIDE

The fifth Design Biennale Zurich, SIDE BY SIDE, runs from 5 to 14 September 2025 at the Alter Botanischer Garten of the University of Zurich under the artistic direction of Nina Paim and the curatorial work of the Icelandic materials researcher Björn Steinar Blumenstein, with co-founder Gabriela Chicherio continuing as festival director. The anniversary edition gathers eleven new design projects around the question of what it means to work alongside — alongside materials, alongside other species, alongside the people whose knowledge sits outside the design school.

By the Biennale Editorial Team

The Design Biennale Zurich is Switzerland's biennale of design, founded in 2017 in Zurich by the Verein Freundeskreis Design, an association initiated in 2015 by the Lausanne-trained product designer Gabriela Chicherio and the Lucerne-based object designer Andreas Saxer with the explicit institutional argument that Zurich — a city already host to the Museum für Gestaltung, the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and a wider continuing-design infrastructure of unusual density for a city of its size — nevertheless lacked a continuing cultural-and-intellectual public event for design of the kind that London, Helsinki and Vienna had long enjoyed. The biennale was conceived as a public, free, city-wide event programmed every other year on the German-speaking design calendar; the first edition opened on 7 September 2017 under the title HELLO FUTURE, with curated installations distributed across the Old Botanical Garden, the Toni-Areal (the ZHdK building and the home of the Museum für Gestaltung's design and applied-arts collection), the Swiss National Museum and the SBB Repair & Trade Center. The institutional patrons of the founding edition included the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, the Zurich University of the Arts and the Swiss Design Association.

The fifth edition, SIDE BY SIDE, opens on 5 September 2025 and runs through 14 September under the artistic direction of the Brazilian-Swiss designer and curator Nina Paim (long resident in Basel and a continuing curatorial voice in the Swiss design discourse) and the curatorial work of Björn Steinar Blumenstein (an Icelandic product designer and materials researcher whose practice is centred on Reykjavík and on continuing collaborations with foresters, farmers and other non-designer knowledge-keepers). The edition's premise — that the contemporary design subject is the question of what it means to design alongside, rather than for or on behalf of, the material and the collaborator — is developed across eleven commissioned projects programmed at the Alter Botanischer Garten of the University of Zurich, the nineteenth-century botanical garden at Pelikanstrasse 40 that has served as the biennale's institutional anchor since the second edition in 2019. The Freundeskreis Design has framed the anniversary edition around the milestone of the biennale's 100th commissioned project across its five editions, programmed alongside performances, guided tours, a children's programme and a continuing public-conference component.

A young institution at the intersection of three Swiss design pillars

The institutional argument the Design Biennale Zurich makes — and which distinguishes it from the older Vitra Design Museum (Weil am Rhein, founded 1989 by the Vitra furniture company across the Swiss-German border) and from the Museum für Gestaltung itself (the Swiss national museum of design and visual communication, integrated since 2007 within the Zurich University of the Arts) — is that the biennale was conceived not as an exhibition of Swiss design but as a continuing public discursive event programmed by the Swiss design scene for the Swiss design scene and for the wider international audience. The Verein Freundeskreis Design, the support association founded by Chicherio and Saxer in 2015, is constituted not as a museum or a school but as an independent civic association of designers, educators and curators; the biennale's curatorial method — open call, peer review, public installation — is structurally distinct from the curated-collection display that defines the Museum für Gestaltung and the brand-anchored programming that defines Vitra.

The continuing programmatic thread across the institution's five editions has been the deliberate widening of the design subject from the conventional product-design and graphic-design poles of the Swiss design heritage into game and interaction design (the 2019 edition PLAY, guest-curated by ZHdK Game Design researcher Maike Thies), scenography and immersive practice, material research (the 2023 edition SHIFT and the 2025 edition SIDE BY SIDE, both of which programmed extensively around mycelium, biomaterials and circular-economy design), and the wider field of design as a public methodology for collaborative inquiry. The biennale's continuing institutional question — whether a young biennale, conceived from outside the museum and outside the school, can hold a continuing position within an already dense Swiss design infrastructure — is the question the 2025 anniversary edition is the institution's working answer to.

SIDE BY SIDE — the 2025 participating designers

The 2025 edition's commissioned cohort was announced as a deliberately small, peer-reviewed group: Annina Arter; HSLU – Hochschule Luzern – Design Film Kunst / Camera Arts; Ethel Rossetti & Elena Zihlmann; Guy Meldem / Meubles Meldem; Jonatan Bischof & Simon Jeger with Studio VERDE; Kollektiv Krönlihalle; Lara Mehling & Nicole de Lalouvière; Lena Tünkers & Nøha (Andrea Suardi, Ani Safaryan); Maria Smigielska & Ana Ascic; Onari Projects (Anina Amacker & Laura Moor); Valerie Hess & Sibylle Stœckli; Yves Ebnöther. The cohort programmes Swiss-trained product, spatial and material-research practice alongside collaborators from the wider European design community, with biomaterial, garden and landscape work given particular weight at the Alter Botanischer Garten venue — the curatorial argument that designing "alongside" material and collaborator is the working method of the 2020s design field.

The 2025 conclusion — and what comes next

After the 2025 edition closed on 14 September, the Verein Freundeskreis Design published a public statement to the effect that SIDE BY SIDE would be the institution's final Design Biennale Zurich edition. The decision — articulated by co-founders Chicherio and Saxer as the closing chapter of a self-defined ten-year arc rather than as an institutional crisis — frames the five editions of 2017–2025 as a complete programme: over a hundred commissioned projects across the decade, a Swiss-design public-discursive position consolidated within the Zurich and wider German-speaking design field, and a continuing institutional inheritance through the Zurich Design Weeks, which the Freundeskreis Design co-founded and which now carries the public-design-event calendar in Zurich. The association also published the anthology Poetry and Pragmatism: An Anthology of the Design Biennale Zurich 2017–2025 with Edition Hochparterre in Zurich to mark the conclusion. There is no Design Biennale Zurich planned for 2027 or beyond — the next stage of the Swiss design conversation moves to the annual Zurich Design Weeks, the continuing Museum für Gestaltung programme, and the Vitra Design Museum's continuing exhibition calendar across the border.

Critical Perspective A biennale inside the Swiss design ecosystem

Zurich and the already-saturated Swiss design field

London (2016) is bigger and built on the older London Design Festival. Lisbon's Architecture Triennale (2007) carries the stronger Iberian-architectural argument. The Vitra Design Museum holds the longer institutional collection. The Design Biennale Zurich is the youngest of the European design biennales — and the one that has built its argument inside one of the world's densest design infrastructures, alongside Swiss graphic design's continuing heritage, the Museum für Gestaltung's national collection, ECAL and ZHdK's continuing teaching, and the Vitra ecosystem across the border.

By the Biennale Editorial Team

Switzerland's design infrastructure is, for a country of nine million, of unusual density. The Swiss Style of graphic design — the typographic and editorial vocabulary developed across the 1950s and 1960s at the Zurich and Basel schools by figures including Josef Müller-Brockmann, Armin Hofmann and Max Bill — was the dominant international graphic-design language of the second half of the twentieth century and remains, in the working judgement of the field, the single most important post-war contribution Switzerland has made to the visual arts. The Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, founded as the museum of the Zurich school of applied arts in the nineteenth century and integrated since 2007 within the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), holds the country's national design collection of more than half a million objects across graphics, posters, applied arts and design. The Vitra Design Museum, founded 1989 at Weil am Rhein on the German side of the Swiss-German border by the Vitra furniture company, holds the principal international collection of twentieth-century furniture design in continuing public exhibition. ECAL in Lausanne and the design departments of ZHdK in Zurich and the Hochschule Luzern – Design Film Kunst together form a continuing teaching pipeline that has placed Swiss-trained designers across the international design and design-education field. ETH Zurich's continuing architecture and design-research programmes round out the picture.

Against that ecosystem — already among the densest in Europe — the question the Design Biennale Zurich has had to answer from its 2017 founding is what a continuing biennale of design could add. The institutional argument, made consistently across the five editions, is that the existing Swiss design infrastructure is structured around three poles — the historical-collection pole (the Museum für Gestaltung), the brand-and-furniture pole (Vitra, the Swiss product-design industries) and the educational pole (ECAL, ZHdK, HSLU) — and that none of these institutions is structured around the public-discursive function that a biennale, programmed every other year as a free city-wide event, can carry. The biennale is the Swiss design field's continuing public-question event; the museums and schools are its institutions of record and of training.

The comparative frame is most productively drawn against the London Design Biennale (Somerset House, founded 2016 by John Sorrell and Ben Evans on the older base of the London Design Festival) and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (founded 2007, continuing across seven editions as the only architecture triennale of the Iberian Peninsula). Both of those institutions are larger by participating-country count (the London Design Biennale's national-pavilion model put 37 countries at the founding 2016 edition; the Lisbon Architecture Triennale's 2007 founding drew 52,000 visitors); both have older institutional partners (Somerset House, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) than the Design Biennale Zurich's young Verein Freundeskreis Design. The structural argument the Zurich institution makes against those comparators is that the biennale is not a national-pavilion exhibition but a continuing public design programme rooted in one city's institutional and educational network — closer in form to the Triennale di Milano's continuing public role within the Italian design discourse than to the London Design Biennale's international-pavilion structure.

The continuing institutional risk the biennale carries — the risk that any young biennale carries against an established infrastructure — is whether the public-discursive position can be sustained against the centripetal pull of the older institutions (the Museum für Gestaltung's continuing public exhibitions; Vitra's continuing brand-and-museum programming; the schools' continuing degree-show calendars). The Freundeskreis Design's continuing answer, articulated across the editions from HELLO FUTURE (2017) through SIDE BY SIDE (2025), is that the biennale's free, distributed, public format is structurally complementary rather than competitive — the institution programmes the city in the two weeks the museums and schools do not — and that the continuing eight-year record of public attendance and design-press engagement is the institutional demonstration of that bet.

The Institutional Spine

Defining moments

Five editions across eight years of the Swiss biennale of design.

2017I · Foundation

The founding HELLO FUTURE edition

The inaugural Design Biennale Zurich opened on 7 September 2017 under the title HELLO FUTURE, with curated installations and a discursive conference programme distributed across the Alter Botanischer Garten, the Toni-Areal (ZHdK and the Museum für Gestaltung's design collection), the Swiss National Museum and the SBB Repair & Trade Center. The makers and curators were Fabienne Barras, Gabriela Chicherio and Andreas Saxer, operating under the support association Verein Freundeskreis Design they had founded in 2015. The founding institutional partners included the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, the Zurich University of the Arts and the Swiss Design Association.

Sources: Zürich Tourism; DETAIL

2019II · PLAY

The PLAY edition and the move into game design

The second Design Biennale Zurich, PLAY, ran from 29 August to 1 September 2019 with the Alter Botanischer Garten of the University of Zurich now established as the principal venue. The edition was curated by Maike Thies (Research Fellow in Game Design at ZHdK), Gabriela Chicherio and Andreas Saxer, and made the deliberate institutional move out of the conventional graphic-and-product-design poles of the Swiss design heritage into game design, interaction design and playful research practice — a widening of the design subject that has continued across the subsequent editions.

Sources: Archipanic; Architonic

2021III · CLASH

The CLASH edition during the pandemic interregnum

The third edition, CLASH, ran from 12 August to 5 September 2021 at the Alter Botanischer Garten under continuing direction of Gabriela Chicherio and Andreas Saxer. Programmed across the longest single-edition window in the institution's history, the edition took the collision of values, traditions and expectations as its constituting subject — a frame the curators developed in direct response to the post-2020 reorganisation of the European design and exhibition calendar. The expanded twenty-five-day run was the institution's working answer to the pandemic-era constraint on the conventional opening-weekend biennale format.

Sources: ArchDaily; wemakeit

2023IV · SHIFT

The SHIFT edition's turn to material research

The fourth edition, SHIFT, ran from 1 to 19 September 2023 at the Alter Botanischer Garten under Gabriela Chicherio and Andreas Saxer, with fifteen interactive design installations programmed around the question of transformation across scales — from the molecular to the planetary. The edition is the institution's principal turn into material-research and circular-economy practice: notable installations included ice formwork for concrete, mycelium furniture and a wider grouping of upcycling, data-design, scent and virtual-reality projects. The 2023 edition consolidated the biennale's continuing position within the European design-research conversation.

Sources: STIRworld; TLmagazine

2025V · SIDE BY SIDE · final edition

Paim and Blumenstein's anniversary — and the institution's last edition

The fifth and final Design Biennale Zurich, SIDE BY SIDE, ran from 5 to 14 September 2025 at the Alter Botanischer Garten under the artistic direction of Nina Paim and the curatorial work of Björn Steinar Blumenstein, with Gabriela Chicherio as festival director. The anniversary edition gathered eleven new commissioned projects — by Annina Arter, HSLU Camera Arts, Ethel Rossetti & Elena Zihlmann, Guy Meldem / Meubles Meldem, Jonatan Bischof & Simon Jeger with Studio VERDE, Kollektiv Krönlihalle, Lara Mehling & Nicole de Lalouvière, Lena Tünkers & Nøha, Maria Smigielska & Ana Ascic, Onari Projects, Valerie Hess & Sibylle Stœckli, and Yves Ebnöther — and brought the institution's cumulative output across five editions to over one hundred design projects. After the closing weekend, the Verein Freundeskreis Design announced the biennale's conclusion and published the anthology Poetry and Pragmatism: An Anthology of the Design Biennale Zurich 2017–2025 with Edition Hochparterre. The institution's public-design-event work continues through the co-founded Zurich Design Weeks.

Sources: designbiennalezurich.ch; SIDE BY SIDE 2025 archive; Edition Hochparterre — Poetry and Pragmatism

People in the Zurich programme

The figures behind Zurich

Co-founder & Festival Director · I–V (2017–2025)

Gabriela Chicherio

Swiss product designer trained at ECAL Lausanne in product and industrial design. Co-founder, with Andreas Saxer, of the Verein Freundeskreis Design in 2015 and continuing co-curator of the Design Biennale Zurich across all five editions from HELLO FUTURE (2017) through SIDE BY SIDE (2025). Since 2024 she has held the role of festival director of the biennale, with continuing responsibility for thematic focus, original formats and external collaborations; she is additionally a co-founder of the Zurich Design Weeks and works as a design tour guide for the Design Promenade.

Source: chicherio.com; Verein Freundeskreis Design

Co-founder & Treasurer · I–V (2017–2025)

Andreas Saxer

Swiss object and space designer whose practice serves companies and cultural institutions; lecturer in Object Design at the Hochschule Luzern – Design Film Kunst and a board member of the Swiss Design Association. Co-founder, with Gabriela Chicherio, of the Verein Freundeskreis Design in 2015; serves as treasurer of the Design Biennale Zurich's support association and has co-curated the biennale's five editions from the founding 2017 HELLO FUTURE through to the 2025 anniversary edition.

Source: Verein Freundeskreis Design; Swiss Design Association

Founding co-curator & advisory board · I (2017)

Fabienne Barras

Swiss exhibition organiser, scenographer and curator (b. 1973) whose practice centres on storytelling and the mediation of content in built and exhibition space; she curates and designs national and international exhibitions and festivals. Founding co-curator of the inaugural 2017 Design Biennale Zurich, HELLO FUTURE, alongside Gabriela Chicherio and Andreas Saxer; continues to sit on the advisory board (Beirat) of the Verein Freundeskreis Design.

Source: Verein Freundeskreis Design; LinkedIn profile

Guest curator · II PLAY (2019)

Maike Thies

German-Swiss researcher and Research Fellow at the BA Major in Game Design at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), where she also serves as Head of Communications & Interdisciplinary Innovation of the Department of Design. Her research is centred on interactive theatre, narrative spaces, immersive worlds and play. Guest curator of the second Design Biennale Zurich, PLAY (2019), alongside Gabriela Chicherio and Andreas Saxer — the edition that made the institution's deliberate move from product and graphic design into game and interaction design.

Source: ZHdK Game Design; maikethies.com

Artistic Director · V SIDE BY SIDE (2025)

Nina Paim

Brazilian-Swiss designer, curator, researcher and editor whose practice is centred on design pedagogy, decoloniality and the politics of design; long resident in Basel and a continuing curatorial voice in the Swiss-German design discourse. Artistic Director of the fifth Design Biennale Zurich, SIDE BY SIDE (2025), with the announced curatorial argument that the contemporary design subject is the question of what it means to work alongside material and collaborator rather than to design on their behalf.

Source: designbiennalezurich.ch; STIRworld

Curator · V SIDE BY SIDE (2025)

Björn Steinar Blumenstein

Icelandic product designer and materials researcher whose Reykjavík-based practice is centred on collaborative work with foresters, farmers and other non-designer knowledge-keepers, and on a continuing inquiry into the material substrates of contemporary production. Curator of the fifth Design Biennale Zurich, SIDE BY SIDE (2025); his publicly stated curatorial frame for the edition treats the biennale as “a living laboratory” and argues for a shift in design thinking away from the figure of the designer as maker of beautiful objects toward design as a methodology for tackling complex problems.

Source: bjornsteinar.com; STIRworld

Founded
2017 · Zurich
Frequency
Biennial · 2017–2025 (concluded)
Principal venue
Alter Botanischer Garten
Organiser
Verein Freundeskreis Design
Co-founders
Chicherio & Saxer

Geography

The Design Biennale Zurich at the Alter Botanischer Garten

Principal venues

Alter Botanischer Garten der Universität Zürich

The University of Zurich's nineteenth-century botanical garden, with the 1877 Schoch palm house — the principal venue of the Design Biennale Zurich from the second edition (2019) onward, including the fifth-edition anniversary programme of 2025.

Pelikanstrasse 40
8001 Zürich
Switzerland

Museum für Gestaltung Zürich — Toni-Areal

The Swiss national museum of design and visual communication, integrated since 2007 within the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK); the museum's design collection at the Toni-Areal was a founding venue of the inaugural 2017 biennale and continues as institutional partner.

Pfingstweidstrasse 96
8005 Zürich
Switzerland

Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum (Landesmuseum Zürich)

The Swiss National Museum at the central railway station, a founding 2017 venue of the biennale's HELLO FUTURE distributed programme across the inner city.

Museumstrasse 2
8001 Zürich
Switzerland

From the Directory

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Essential Reading

For further work

Design Biennale Zürich — HELLO FUTURE

Fabienne Barras, Gabriela Chicherio & Andreas Saxer, curators  ·  2017

Programme of the founding 2017 edition distributed across the Alter Botanischer Garten, Toni-Areal, Swiss National Museum and SBB Repair & Trade Center.

Design Biennale Zürich — PLAY

Maike Thies, Gabriela Chicherio & Andreas Saxer, curators  ·  2019

The second edition's catalogue, marking the biennale's institutional move from product and graphic design into game and interaction design.

Design Biennale Zürich — CLASH

Gabriela Chicherio & Andreas Saxer, curators  ·  2021

The pandemic-era third edition, programmed across a twenty-five-day run at the Alter Botanischer Garten under the theme of collision.

Design Biennale Zürich — SHIFT

Gabriela Chicherio & Andreas Saxer, curators  ·  2023

The fourth edition's catalogue: fifteen interactive design installations on transformation across scales, the institution's principal turn into material research.

Design Biennale Zürich — SIDE BY SIDE

Nina Paim & Björn Steinar Blumenstein, curators  ·  2025

Programme of the fifth-edition anniversary, gathering eleven commissioned projects around the question of designing alongside material and collaborator.

From the news desk

Institutional record

Context: the Swiss design field

Frequently asked questions

About the Design Biennale Zurich

When is Design Biennale Zurich?

The fifth and final Design Biennale Zurich, SIDE BY SIDE, ran from 5 to 14 September 2025. The biennale was programmed every other year between 2017 and 2025; the Verein Freundeskreis Design announced after the 2025 edition that the institution is concluding and will continue its work through the co-founded Zurich Design Weeks.

Where was the Design Biennale Zurich held?

The principal venue from the second edition (2019) through to the fifth (2025) was the Alter Botanischer Garten of the University of Zurich at Pelikanstrasse 40, 8001 Zürich, Switzerland — the nineteenth-century botanical garden with the 1877 Schoch palm house. The founding 2017 edition was distributed across multiple sites including the Alter Botanischer Garten, the Toni-Areal (ZHdK and the Museum für Gestaltung's design collection), the Swiss National Museum and the SBB Repair & Trade Center.

Who organised the Design Biennale Zurich?

The Verein Freundeskreis Design — an independent Zurich-based association founded in 2015 by product designers Gabriela Chicherio and Andreas Saxer — organised the biennale across all five editions from 2017 to 2025. Chicherio served as festival director from 2024.

How often was the Design Biennale Zurich held?

The Design Biennale Zurich was held every two years between 2017 and 2025, across five editions: HELLO FUTURE (2017), PLAY (2019), CLASH (2021), SHIFT (2023) and SIDE BY SIDE (2025). The 2025 edition was the institution's final one.

Was Design Biennale Zurich free to attend?

Yes. The Design Biennale Zurich was a free, public exhibition across all five editions from 2017 to 2025, supplemented by guided tours, kids' workshops and a public-conference programme.

Will there be a Design Biennale Zurich in 2027?

No. The Verein Freundeskreis Design announced after the 2025 SIDE BY SIDE edition that the Design Biennale Zurich is concluding after five editions. The association published the anthology Poetry and Pragmatism: An Anthology of the Design Biennale Zurich 2017–2025 with Edition Hochparterre in Zurich, and continues to support Swiss design through the co-founded Zurich Design Weeks. For the wider Swiss and German-speaking design calendar from 2026 onward, see the Zurich Design Weeks, the continuing Museum für Gestaltung programme, and the Vitra Design Museum exhibition calendar across the border.

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