For their final projects on reusing knitted textiles, building a Cologne-based soil-care network, and creating T-shirt designs as a rebellion against dress codes, three students from the Köln International School of Design (KISD) at TH Köln have been awarded the Cologne Design Prize. A total of €45,000 in prize money was awarded.
First place went to Francis Trogemann for her project “Von Masche zu Masche – Recycling im Loop” (“From Stitch to Stitch – Recycling in the Loop”). In light of scarce resources and growing volumes of waste, the textile industry is under pressure to develop circular solutions. Conventional recycling, however, is laborious and energy-intensive, as textiles must be completely dismantled to recover new yarns or fibers. Knitted textiles, by contrast, offer an economically attractive option, as their yarns can be almost completely unraveled thanks to their stitch structure. Trogemann examined how the established craft of unravelling and re-knitting can be transformed into an industrially scalable practice. She also explored how garments need to be designed to enable this. For her work, the KISD graduate received €13,000 in prize money.
The second prize and €10,000 went to Lucy Allen. In her project “The Bodenlabor Kalk” (“The Soil Lab Kalk”), she spent a year building a soil-care network around a plot of land in Cologne’s Kalk district — a grassroots democratic alternative to the bureaucratic process of municipal soil remediation. Through workshops and regular workdays, the KISD master’s graduate involved local residents in the practical care of the soil and examined it from interdisciplinary perspectives.
Pavla Geschwandtner completed the podium with third place for her bachelor’s thesis “Go Dress Yourself.” For this project, she created a magazine of the same name, which explains how dress codes in institutions work and how such regulations reinforce outdated notions of masculinity and femininity. With a T-shirt collection she designed, the restrictive linguistic dress prescriptions are transformed into personal statements of resistance. The collection is part of a pattern magazine for women and invites readers to recreate the designs themselves. The KISD graduate received €8,000 in prize money for her work.
Special Prize Winners
In the “Special Prizes” category, David Sieverding and Martin Sistig, also KISD graduates, received €3,000 for their project “Das Metrobiom” (“The Metrobiome”). In their work, they understand the city as a microbially interconnected living system. They show that microbes are invisible co-shapers of urban health, material cycles, and resilience, and must be regarded as parameters for architecture, urban planning, material development, and social coexistence. In this way, the metrobiome becomes a research resource for integrating ecological, social, and technological systems.
Two additional special prizes of €3,000 each went to Fabian Burgard from Rheinische Hochschule Köln for “Rast – Ausländische Fernfahrer auf deutschen Rastplätzen” (“Rest – Foreign Truck Drivers at German Rest Areas”) and Jaime Pawlowski from Macromedia Campus Cologne for “Kubus.”
The special prize awarded by KölnBusiness, worth €5,000, went to Sebastian Härder from Ecosign – Academy for Sustainable Design for his project “Future E-Recycling.”
Exhibition at MAKK
All 39 nominated works will be on display from 28 November to 7 December 2025 at the Museum of Applied Arts Cologne (MAKK). The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free.
About the Award
The Cologne Design Prize is awarded by the Prof. Dr.-Ing. R. G. Winkler Foundation. It honors outstanding final projects from design degree programs at five Cologne universities, thereby contributing to the promotion of emerging talent and strengthening Cologne’s profile as a design hub.
Pics @ KISD Foto AG / TH Köln