Month: May 2026

CriticON is a playful system that turns everyday exposure to information into moments of critical thinking, using humor, interaction, and AI to help young people question, verify, and resist misinformation in digital environments.

Define the problem/need you are solving or addressing with your project. How does it address the Open Call criteria, such as environmental impact, social engagement, circularity, user experience, resource efficiency, and community-driven solutions?

Young people navigate a digital environment where information is constant, fast, and emotionally charged. Platforms reward immediacy and engagement over accuracy, enabling misinformation to spread effortlessly. Despite being digitally native, many lack accessible ways to question what they consume in real time. Verifying information requires friction — switching platforms, investing time, and risking social tension — so doubt rarely leads to action.
CriticON addresses this behavioral gap by intervening at the exact moment misinformation spreads: when users decide to believe, share, or ignore content. It transforms this instant into an opportunity for critical thinking through playful, accessible interactions.
The project aligns with humane and ethical applications of technology by using AI to promote transparency, agency, and informed decision-making. It also functions as a design-led educational tool, fostering awareness, responsibility, and a cultural shift toward more critical and conscious digital behaviors.

Please describe your project, reflecting on the concept, inspiration, materials, technical aspects, methods and process(es).

The project was developed following a Double Diamond approach, combining research, definition, and iterative design. We conducted initial research to identify key insights around misinformation behaviors, mapping stakeholders and analyzing barriers using frameworks such as COM-B and the Behavior Change Wheel. This led to the creation of user personas and the identification of a critical gap: the moment between doubt and action. From this, we ideated and evaluated multiple concepts, refining them through tools like value proposition canvases, user journeys, and strategic analysis. CriticON emerged as an experimental system that transforms verification into an interactive, lightweight, and repeatable experience. It operates through two core dynamics: a rapid “True or Fake” challenge that trains instinctive judgment, and a verification tool that analyzes shared content and returns contextualized feedback. By combining humor, cultural references, and AI-assisted responses, CriticON creates a conversational experience that encourages critical thinking as a habit, not an exception

What do you think makes your project innovative compared to the existing efforts and ideas in the field it addresses?

CriticON shifts the focus from information tools to behavior design. Rather than improving access to verified content, it intervenes in how people engage with information in real time, embedding critical thinking directly into everyday digital interactions and reducing the friction that prevents action.
The project approaches AI as a transparent, assistive layer that supports human judgment without replacing it, prioritizing agency, clarity, and interpretability over automation.
Its innovation also lies in reframing critical thinking as something social and desirable. By combining humor, gamification, and culturally familiar formats, CriticON makes verification visible and shareable.
Finally, its modular and platform-agnostic nature allows it to adapt across educational, civic, and digital contexts. As an evolving prototype, it continuously tests how design can shape more reflective, responsible, and conscious digital behaviors at scale.

Does it impact or reflect young people need(s) and how?

CriticON directly responds to the realities young people face in digital environments, where information is constant, fast, and often overwhelming. While they are highly connected, they lack tools that fit seamlessly into their habits and allow them to question information without interrupting their experience.
The project addresses this need by integrating critical thinking into familiar formats—short interactions, gamified dynamics, and conversational feedback—making it feel natural rather than effortful. It recognizes that for young users, behavior is shaped not only by knowledge but by context, speed, and social dynamics.
By making verification quick, accessible, and even shareable, CriticON supports young people in developing confidence, autonomy, and a more active role in how they engage with information. It transforms critical thinking from an abstract skill into a lived, everyday practice.

An interactive audiovisual installation that reveals how data infrastructure reorganises ecology, territory, and memory in Guizhou, translating the hidden costs of digital expansion into a spatial experience of listening, sensing, and critical reflection.

Define the problem/need you are solving or addressing with your project. How does it address the Open Call criteria, such as environmental impact, social engagement, circularity, user experience, resource efficiency, and community-driven solutions?

Cloud of Polyphony addresses a problem that shapes everyday life yet often remains invisible: the ecological and territorial cost of digital infrastructure. Data centres, 5G networks, and platform expansion are presented as progress, while their energy demands, land use, and environmental consequences stay out of view. This matters directly to young people because digital systems organise how they communicate, study, work, and build social life. The project responds by creating an interactive installation that makes those hidden conditions perceptible through sound, image, and spatial experience. By connecting platform growth in Guizhou to local ecologies and social histories, the work invites critical reflection on technological dependence, environmental responsibility, and what a more just digital future could require.

Please describe your project, reflecting on the concept, inspiration, materials, technical aspects, methods and process(es).

The project combines sound installation, moving image, reclaimed construction materials, and sensor-based interaction. It begins from field research in Guizhou, a region reshaped by data infrastructure and digital industrial policy. I work with field recordings, synthesised audio textures, oral histories, and visual references drawn from 5G towers, abandoned expo sites, and altered landscapes. These elements are assembled into an immersive environment built from reused plywood and truss structures. Sensors register audience movement and modulate the sonic composition, so listening becomes a situated encounter rather than passive reception. The method joins spatial research, audiovisual montage, material reuse, and installation testing to translate complex infrastructural processes into an embodied, legible, and critically charged experience.

What do you think makes your project innovative compared to the existing efforts and ideas in the field it addresses?

The project is innovative because it treats data infrastructure as a spatial, sensory, and political condition rather than a neutral technical background. Instead of offering a product fix, it creates a public interface for understanding how digital expansion reorganises land, labour, energy, and perception. Its environmental contribution lies in exposing the ecological costs of supposedly immaterial systems and reusing materials in the installation itself. Its social value lies in connecting local histories, oral narratives, and collective listening to wider questions of technological governance. Its user experience is immersive yet reflective, using sound and movement to build awareness rather than spectacle. In this way, Cloud of Polyphony aligns with the call’s interest in ethical technology, cultural shift, and humane futures.

Does it impact or reflect young people need(s) and how?

Yes. The project reflects young people’s conditions because digital infrastructure shapes how they study, work, communicate, and imagine the future. Cloud of Polyphony addresses the gap between everyday digital dependence and the hidden systems that sustain it: data centres, network expansion, energy extraction, and territorial transformation. Young people inherit these infrastructures as both users and future decision-makers, while they also face the environmental and social consequences they produce. The installation creates an embodied way to sense those conditions through sound, image, and spatial interaction. It invites younger audiences to understand digital technology as a material and political system rather than a seamless service. This shift in perception matters because it supports critical awareness, ecological responsibility, and a more active position toward the technological futures they are expected to live within.

Chick-Inn reimagines the chicken coop as an architectural space of dignity, shifting small-scale food infrastructure from productivity toward care, individuality, and respectful human–animal interaction through spatial design that reduces stress and fosters interspecies coexistence.

Define the problem/need you are solving or addressing with your project. How does it address the Open Call criteria, such as environmental impact, social engagement, circularity, user experience, resource efficiency, and community-driven solutions?

Small-scale animal housing is often treated as purely functional infrastructure, where productivity outweighs wellbeing. Even outside industrial farming, chickens are reduced to egg-producing units, and spatial design rarely considers stress, behavioural needs, or respectful human–animal interaction.

Chick-Inn addresses this by redefining the coop as a space of care rather than extraction. It shifts the focus from output to dignity, proposing a more humane model of small-scale food production. By encouraging decentralised, local practices, the project supports environmental responsibility and reduces reliance on industrial systems. Its compact, durable construction promotes resource efficiency and longevity. At a social level, it reframes everyday agriculture as an opportunity for conscious engagement, empathy, and shared responsibility. The project aligns with the call’s vision by demonstrating how design can reshape relationships, not only between people, but between species.

Please describe your project, reflecting on the concept, inspiration, materials, technical aspects, methods and process(es).

Chick-Inn emerged from questioning why even small-scale animal housing replicates industrial logic. The project reimagines the chicken coop as an architectural micro-environment shaped by care, observation, and respect for non-human individuality.
The design process began with studying chickens’ behavioural patterns, such as nesting habits, stress responses, and movement rhythms, and translating these insights into spatial decisions. The structure separates human access from nesting areas through an external egg-collection system, reducing disturbance while maintaining functionality. An interactive feeding element transforms routine maintenance into intentional engagement.
Constructed as a compact, durable timber structure, the coop prioritises longevity, clarity of assembly, and resource-conscious material use. The design balances practicality with ethical intention, demonstrating how even modest rural infrastructure can embody architectural thinking.
Chick-Inn proposes that care can be embedded in construction itself, turning an everyday agricultural typology into a spatial expression of interspecies responsibility.

What do you think makes your project innovative compared to the existing efforts and ideas in the field it addresses?

Chick-Inn is innovative because it transforms a mundane, utilitarian structure into a small-scale architectural experiment that prioritises animal wellbeing, human engagement, and ethical design. Unlike conventional coops, which focus solely on containment and productivity, it treats each hen as an individual with needs, personality, and space to express natural behaviours.
Spatially, the design integrates verticality, playful perches, and interactive elements that reframe routine tasks, such as feeding, egg collection and cleaning, as moments of mindful interaction rather than mechanical chores. Each nesting box is playfully labelled with charming names such as “Hen-Riette” or “Koko Chanel,” highlighting individuality and celebrating the hens as inhabitants rather than mere producers.

Does it impact or reflect young people need(s) and how?

Yes, it reflects young people’s needs by inviting them to reconsider relationships with the living world and everyday infrastructure. Chick-Inn demonstrates that even small, ordinary spaces, like a chicken coop, can embody care, observation, and ethical design. By prioritising the hens’ dignity and individuality, the project encourages empathy, reflection, and a sense of responsibility for non-human lives.
The interactive feeding station and external egg-collection system make daily engagement playful, intuitive, and rewarding, promoting active participation rather than passive management. It shows that design can be humanistic, socially aware, and fun, not just functional.
Through humour, charm, and architectural clarity, like nesting boxes labelled “Hen-Riette” or “Koko Chanel”, Chick-Inn inspires young audiences to question standardized systems, rethink their impact, and explore creative solutions that integrate care, ethics, and environmental awareness into everyday practices.

Chaiterra explores the potential of tea waste to create biobased materials, transforming discarded organic matter from local industry into functional products for a sustainable future.

Define the problem/need you are solving or addressing with your project. How does it address the Open Call criteria, such as environmental impact, social engagement, circularity, user experience, resource efficiency, and community-driven solutions?

The project addresses the dual crisis of plastic pollution and industrial organic waste. While the food and drink industry generates massive amounts of tea residues, traditional production still relies heavily on fossil-fuel-based plastics that pollute our ecosystems for centuries. Chaiterra identifies a specific opportunity within a local company to intercept their tea waste before it reaches landfills.
This initiative directly impacts young people, who are increasingly vocal about the plastic crisis and demand transparent, local production cycles. By transforming specific waste streams from the local food industry into functional objects, the project provides a tangible alternative to single-use plastics. It empowers the younger generation to transition from a “take-make-waste” mindset to one of environmental stewardship and localized resource management.

Please describe your project, reflecting on the concept, inspiration, materials, technical aspects, methods and process(es).

The concept focuses on creating a natural, fully biodegradable alternative to plastic, using tea waste sourced from a local company. Inspired by the principles of regenerative design, the process explores how organic leftovers can be stabilized without synthetic additives.
The technical method involves drying and processing the industrial tea residues, which are then combined with bio-based binders through a low-energy compression process. This “kitchen-to-studio” approach ensures that the material remains non-toxic and structurally sound for its intended use. By maintaining a simple, transparent production line, Chaiterra highlights the raw, sensory qualities of the tea. The resulting product is not just an object but a functional carrier of a circular story, designed to support natural cycles at every stage of its existence.

What do you think makes your project innovative compared to the existing efforts and ideas in the field it addresses?

Chaiterra’s innovation lies in its regenerative approach to material sourcing, turning a local industry’s byproduct into a high-value resource. It prioritizes circularity and resource efficiency over traditional, high-impact manufacturing. By replacing plastic with a biobased material, the project significantly reduces environmental footprints.
Socially, it engages the local community by closing the loop between a neighborhood company and the final consumer. The user experience is defined by the material’s honesty—its ability to eventually return to the earth as compost, supporting natural cycles. This makes Chaiterra a community-driven solution that proves how design can move beyond sustainability toward true regeneration, ensuring that the product’s end is simply a new beginning for the soil.

Does it impact or reflect young people need(s) and how?

Chaiterra addresses the urgent need of young people to combat plastic pollution through tangible, regenerative actions. By transforming local industrial tea waste into functional design, it offers a transparent alternative to fossil-fuel-based products. This empowers a generation facing ecological anxiety to integrate their ethical values into daily sustainable rituals.