Celebrating Danish Design Award finalists
Among them is Designing Engagements with Mending by Iryna Kucher from Kolding School of Design, finalist in the Young Ideas category.
Once a common skill, clothing repair has faded in the age of fast fashion. Iryna’s project brings it back — turning mending into a creative, empowering, and accessible practice that helps us reconnect with our clothes and the value of making things last.
At its heart is a modular toolkit and set of visual mending samples that make learning repair skills simple and inspiring. But more than that, it’s about shifting our mindset from fixing to caring.
The jury says:
- Through thoughtful design, the project reframes mending as something more than maintenance. It becomes a cultural and practical gateway to sustainable consumption reconnecting people to their garments, and to the value of care.
By making repair a natural part of everyday life, Designing Engagements with Mending shows how small stitches can lead to big sustainability impacts — one garment at a time.
Participants project.
One of our favourite finalists in this year’s Danish Design Award is Galactic Garage, created by Samar Iqbal and Alexandra Wieck from Kolding School of Design together with Ali Ahmad and Adil Najeeb Siddiqui from PixelOre: Indie Game Studio, shortlisted in the Young Ideas category.
What if you could raise a planet like a pet? Galactic Garage turns that question into a playful, hands-on learning experience for children aged 7–10. When a tiny planet crash-lands in their garage, kids are invited to care for it as it grows from newborn to full-grown adult — reacting to every action they take.
Developed through co-creation with students at the International School of Billund, the project blends curiosity and care into an intuitive, digital-physical world. Children can clean oil spills with a bar of soap, cool down rising temperatures, or simply spin the little planet for fun (though too much spinning might make it dizzy). With every interaction comes a deeper understanding of balance, responsibility, and the impact of our choices.
The project grew out of our Child-centred Design course, part of our Design for Play master’s specialisation. As part of the course, the students collaborated with DR Børn & Unge, working closely with children’s media experts to understand how play, learning, and storytelling shape young audiences.
The jury says:
-Galactic Garage uses playful metaphors and familiar tools to translate complex climate ideas into embodied learning. It fosters empathy and agency by showing how small interventions can support — or destabilise — an entire ecosystem.
By making climate concepts tangible, relatable, and fun, Galactic Garage shows how design can nurture environmental awareness from a young age — turning play into a pathway toward long-term care for our shared planet.
We look forward to celebrating this inspiring project, and all the other outstanding finalists, at the Danish Design Award on 21 November.
The Danish Design Award is a collaboration between DDC – Dansk Design Center and Design denmark, with Creative Denmark as brand partner.
