Make It Make Sense German Design Graduates 2026

The nationwide German Design Graduates initiative showcases outstanding final projects from design programmes across Germany. It supports graduates as they enter professional practice and connects them with organisations and individuals from the worlds of business and culture. German Design Graduates is part of the German Design Council Foundation.

Around 70 projects from 28 German universities were selected for the exhibition at Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum. The exhibition brings together work from product and industrial design, communication and digital design, as well as textile and fashion design. In all their diversity, the projects address some of the defining questions of our time. They also reveal the methods a new generation of designers is using to search for answers.

How can waste and leftover materials be transformed into new resources? How can digital technologies be used in meaningful ways? How can design communicate knowledge, enable greater participation in society or imagine new ways of living together?

The exhibition’s curatorial theme, Make It Make Sense, originates in internet culture. The phrase is used when familiar explanations no longer add up, contradictions become visible or a situation needs to be understood from a new perspective. Often used ironically, it also expresses a serious demand: to create connections and make complexity easier to understand.

Across different disciplines, the exhibits explore materials and production methods, technology and communication, as well as social transformation and new forms of living together. They question existing systems, test alternative processes and raise questions for which there are not yet any clear answers.

Together, the projects present a multifaceted picture of what design means today: a practice of observing and understanding, but also of intervening and creating change.