Minerva Skyttä, Floor Berkhout and Hanna-Katri Eskelinen are Selected for the International Scholarship Program Designers in Residence in Pforzheim 2026

From over 300 applications from 60 countries, the jury, consisting of fashion designer Melitta Baumeister, head of the Creative Industries Department in Pforzheim, Almut Benkert, graphic designer and artist Anja Kaiser, jewellery designer Luzia Vogt and materials researcher and industrial designer Charlett Wenig selected the scholarship holders for the Designers in Residence programme 2026 in Pforzheim. 




Minerva Skyttä is a fashion designer from Finland with a master's degree from the internationally renowned Aalto University. She specialises in innovative and sculptural knitwear, with a strong focus on craftsmanship and contemporary design. During her scholarship, she will create a knitwear collection using her own knitting technique, which produces no material waste and allows the designs to emerge during the knitting process. Skyttä's fashion designs are conceived as individual works of art, not intended for mass production. 

Through her work, she opposes fast fashion and overconsumption and seeks to provoke thought, discussion and self-expression. She will use her stay in Pforzheim in particular to further develop her knitting technique with mechanical means and thus strengthen the position of knitwear as a form of artistic expression and craftsmanship.

Minerva Skyttä's project stands out thanks to her self-developed knitting technique, which she uses to create aesthetically innovative and unusually sculptural knitted forms inspired by the memories of past generations. Her work impresses with its depth of craftsmanship, spontaneous design practice and sustainability, as her technique produces no material waste. In this way, she manages to completely rethink knitting," says Melitta Baumeister, explaining the jury's decision.


  Dutch information designer Floor Berkhout completed her master's degree at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Her work navigates the dialectics of the abstract acceleration of digital logic and the slow, tactile wisdom of craft, contributing to translate cloud-based data processing into a tangible form. Informed by queer and feminist epistemologies, she explores crafting autonomy within rigid computational environments. Using the genealogy of the weaving loom as an entry point, she interrogates computation through a material and physiological lens. She thus identifies the algorithmic logic of weaving as an original form of programming, coding as craftsmanship. Building on her research into feminist and decolonial computer practices and permacomputing, her project will construct a tactile server made of textiles and conductive materials that makes data flows physically and visually comprehensible, raises awareness of technological processes, and forges new connections between artisanal material processing and digital logic.

"Floor Berkhout's project is particularly interesting because she positions craftsmanship and design as an essential basis for technological processes in a multi-layered and radically interdisciplinary process," says jury member Charlett Wenig. "She incorporates anthropological, historical and philosophical ideas into her design practice and understands design as an element of information, thereby creating opportunities for the interactive communication of technology and digitalisation. By combining digital calculations with analogue, material-based processes and experiments, she translates web structures into a feminist permacomputing practice that shows: coding is craftsmanship."

Hanna-Katri Eskelinen is a Finnish illustrator, animator, and graphic designer currently based in Sweden, who merges fantasy and reality to explore feelings of joy, nostalgia, and hope. Holding a Bachelor of Arts from Aalto University and a Master of Arts from Konstfack, their practice envisions alternative, sustainable futures. While researching the on-going climate crisis and ecocide, they use illustration, animation, and poetry to focus on people and communities in alternative and speculative worlds, underscoring the urgent need for new ways to live and thrive together. Their residency project researches the concept of ecotopia through the aesthetic lens of Solarpunk and digital softness. It seeks to restore our collective capacity to imagine egalitarian and sustainable futures—ecotopias—through visual communication that unites rather than divides. By merging digital and physical drawing, the work explores how illustration and animation can cultivate empathy, care, and community.

"Hanna-Katri Eskelinen attentively and emphatically incorporates the needs of her environment into her design practice and offers opportunities for action. She uses illustration as a medium and, drawing on feminist tradition, offers perspectives on a future that we might not dare to dream of," says jury member Anja Kaiser.
Eskelinen intends to use the residency to build a bridge between practice and theory. The result will be an immersive, interactive installation and an online experience in which collective decisions influence the development of an ecotopia.



About the Jury
 
Melitta Baumeister is a German fashion designer based in New York City. She completed a BA in fashion design at Pforzheim University (Faculty of Design) and then earned an MFA in fashion design at Parsons School of Design before founding her own brand. In 2014, Melitta Baumeister's debut collection was presented at New York Fashion Week. Her work has since been featured in Vogue, The New York Times, i-D, Numéro and Self Service, among others. This international attention gave her career a decisive boost and enabled her to show her collections on prestigious platforms in Paris. At the heart of Melitta Baumeister's work is the sculptural quality of clothing. She exaggerates volume, shifts proportions and reshapes silhouettes, often using unusual materials and experimental techniques. This unique approach is appreciated by international boutiques and museums alike.

 
Almut Benkert has been head of the Creative Industries Department of the City of Pforzheim since the end of 2011. There, she was responsible for the conversion of the former Emma Jaeger Baths into the EMMA Creative Centre, which she has managed since 2014, and initiated the commissioning of the Alfons Kern Tower (A.K.T;), which is also managed by the Creative Industries Department. Prior to that, she studied law and cultural and media management in Freiburg, Munich and Berlin and was self-employed with a cultural management agency in Berlin. Further stages of her career took her to the State Theatre in Hanover and the State Opera in Stuttgart.


Anja Kaiser is a graphic designer and artist. She deals with the appropriation of resistant media, undisciplined graphic methods and a “messy” design history. In self-initiated projects, she negotiates feminist themes and explores alternative narratives and porous tools in graphic design. In doing so, she examines the transitions between graphics, design, art, music, and forms of digital self-empowerment. She moves in activist circles and subcultural scenes, seeking out spaces for social co-creation. Until March 2023, Anja Kaiser held the professorship for typography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. Her work has been exhibited and awarded prizes at the International Design Biennale in Brno. In 2017, she received the INFORM Prize from the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, an award for conceptual design at the interface of graphic design and art. In 2020, Le Signe – Centre National du Graphisme in Chaumont dedicated a comprehensive solo exhibition to her autonomous and applied design practice.


Luzia Vogt is a jewellery and product designer who works in her studio in Basel. She learned the craft from scratch during an apprenticeship as a goldsmith, worked for several years in various companies in Canada and Switzerland, and deepened and expanded her skills while studying jewellery and device design at the University of Applied Sciences in Pforzheim (Germany), the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NASCAD) in Halifax (Canada) and with silversmiths in Tokyo (Japan). In 2018, she completed her studies in product design at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU in Lucerne, Switzerland) with a master's degree. Luzia Vogt has won various awards, including the Swiss Federal Design Award and the Inhorgenta Europe innovation prize in 2005, and has taught at the University of Liechtenstein and Pforzheim University. Her work can be found in various private and public collections, including the Swiss National Museum in Zurich, the MUDAC in Lausanne (both in Switzerland), the Château Borély in Marseille (France) and the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin (USA).

 
Charlett Wenig is a materials researcher and industrial designer focusing on local biomaterials, their properties and processing potential. She studied industrial design (B.A.) at Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences and then completed her master's degree in integrated design at the University of the Arts Bremen, where she explored the processing of animal bones from slaughterhouse waste in design. She completed her doctorate in materials engineering at the Technical University of Berlin. In her dissertation, she researched the characterisation and sustainable use of native tree species, combining scientific methods with design approaches. At the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, she is a member of the Adaptive Fibrous Materials research group. There, she is dedicated to the study of local plant species – including those from paludiculture – and researches their structure, properties and functions. On this basis, she develops application scenarios for the high-quality and sustainable use of these materials in design. Charlett Wenig teaches and supervises theses at various national and international universities in the fields of design and materials research, including the University of the Arts Bremen, the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin, Bilgi University in Istanbul, the Bauhaus University Weimar and Aalto University in Helsinki.


EMMA – Creative Center Pforzheim, location of the Designers in Residence scholarship. Photo credit: Winfried Reinhardt.


About EMMA Creative Center
 
EMMA – Creative Centre Pforzheim is the central platform for Pforzheim's creative minds. Located in a former Art Nouveau bathhouse on the Enz River, the creative centre offers 3,000 square metres of workshop and co-working spaces, studios, offices and exhibition areas. The city itself is also characterised by a lively creative scene with a focus on design. Numerous university graduates, start-ups, freelancers and companies from the creative industries work in Pforzheim and bring the location to life. Designers in Residence is supported by Sparkasse Pforzheim Calw, C. Hafner, and the Rotary Club Pforzheim-Schloßberg.
 
 

Contact:
Agnes Szedlak
Wirtschaft und Stadtmarketing Pforzheim | Fachbereich Kreativwirtschaft
Emma-Jaeger-Straße 20, 75175 Pforzheim
agnes.szedlak@ws-pforzheim.de