Swiss Design Awards
Description	Federal promotion of Swiss design through an annual competition
Country	Switzerland
Presented by	Federal Office of Culture (FOC)
Website	http://www.swissdesignawards.ch/

The Swiss Design Awards^[1] competition is a hundred-year old design award and one of the three means of design promotion by the Swiss government's Federal Office of Culture, along with the Most Beautiful Swiss Books and the Grand Prix Design. They are open to Swiss designers and to designers resident in Switzerland. Around 17 prizes of CHF 25,000 each are awarded each year.^[2]

The Federal Design Commission (previously known as the Federal Commission for Applied Arts) acts as the jury. The commission is assisted by recognised experts, who it invites for the jury.^[3]

The type of work accepted in the competition includes graphic design, products and objects, fashion and textile design, photography, scenography and mediation, media and interaction design, and design research.^[4]

The competition takes place in two rounds. In the first round, participants submit an entry. The candidates selected by the Commission are invited to a second round, where they present their work at the Swiss Design Awards public exhibition. The exhibition takes place every year in June, at the same time as the Art Basel and Design Miami/Basel exhibitions, and attracts more than 12'000 visitors every year.^[5] The committee selects the winners shortly before the opening of the exhibition.

The competition is influential in Switzerland. It is critically reputed and its relatively high money prize can exert a positive impact on designers' careers.^[4]

The competition was founded in 1917 as a sister competition to the Swiss Art Awards, which had been running since 1898. In 1917, the Swiss government created the Federal Commission of the Applied Arts (FCAA) to support the applied arts via grants, exhibitions, subsidies for professional associations and general financial backing for the applied arts.^[4][6]

The FCAA was initially under the control of the professional associations Schweizerischer Werkbund SWB and L'Oeuvre.^[7] From the 1960s, in the international context of social norm upheaval, the government began a process of reviewing cultural policy.^[8] A group of experts was asked to provide advice, which became known as the Clottu Commission.^[4]

In the 1990s, the Swiss Design Awards in particular, and the Federal Office of Culture's approach to cultural policy in general were heavily criticised by the Schweizerischer Werkbund.^[4] This contributed to a redefinition and relaunch of the competition in 2002.^[9][10]

In 1997, the government celebrated 100 years of Swiss Federal Design promotion with the publication Made in Switzerland.^[11]

The following table lists the winners of the Swiss Design Awards from 2016 to 2025, as published by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture.^[12] In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the physical exhibition and final judging round were canceled, and no official award winners were named.^[13]