The Mechanics of Cinema in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
with Benoit Rossel
This research project by the Film Department at ECAL aims to assess the impact of artificial intelligence on cinema and film education.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Endurance - 2025
with Laurence Bonvin
Take risks, experiment, and try out new approaches or techniques in relation to a current or past project, or their future graduation project. Encourage them to take a project or idea further by experimenting with methodology, technique, and production methods, rather than relying on familiar processes, solutions, know-how, or tried-and-true formulas.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Film Production – 2026
with Julien Bourdeille
Événement Lumineux Through an in-depth exploration of light as a narrative and sensory medium, first-year students created a short film on the theme “Luminous Event.” This project allows them to learn how to manage a complete audiovisual project while mastering the tools of filming, framing, and camera movement.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Last Minute Risk
with Natacha Lesueur
“What is clearly conceived can be clearly expressed, and the words to say it come easily.” Nicholas Boileau, *L’art poétique*. As students embark on their final year of study at ECAL, with their interests and methods taking shape, this final project offers an opportunity to challenge their own rules, established practices and influences, to refuse to settle for the status quo and to take risks.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Suspended Motion
with Nicolas Poillot
By conceptualizing and producing visual content as part of an editorial series, students will explore the concept of applied photography in a practical, creative, and professional manner, working closely with Art Director Nicolas Poillot.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
PHOTOGRAPHY
Le livre d’artiste - 25/26
with Anouk Schneider Agabekov, Nicolas Polli
As part of the magazine course led by Anouk Schneider and Emmanuel Crivelli, second-year Visual Communication students had the opportunity to design a magazine during the second semester. Students were encouraged to fully embrace their artistic freedom at every level of creation, whether in terms of format, paper choice, binding, layout, illustration, text, or typography. In this course, the magazine can take shape through various forms of illustration, such as photography, reproduction, contextualization, drawing, 3D, and more. The focus is placed on the author’s artistic vision and the means used to bring it to life. Students take on multiple roles as editor, curator, and architect, assuming the responsibilities of art director, designer, photographer, stylist, illustrator, typographer, editor-in-chief, and editorial secretary. This course highlights contemporary editorial design by exploring the narrative potential of a carefully crafted content sequence.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
PHOTOGRAPHY
ECAL Light House
with Jean-Vincent Simonet, Léonard Guyot, Florian Pittet (Sigmasix), Vincent Jacquier, Julien Gurtner
During a week of collaborative work, first-year students in the Visual Communication department at ECAL were given the ambitious task of creating a complete audiovisual experience, designing a light and sound architecture based solely on five original musical compositions. Using a central totem-like screen installation and projections on the surrounding walls, enhanced with lasers, they created a visual environment, broadcast in real time, which was presented as a performance to the public at the end of the week. The aim was to construct a universe capable of fully utilizing the space and the various stage elements, inviting the audience to move around and experience the live performance in its entirety. Five cross-functional creative groups, each with a different sound base, were supervised by Jean-Vincent Simonet and Léonard Guyot to produce images and test them throughout the week on the device, which was developed, set up and operated by a sixth group under the supervision of Florian Pittet, Matthieu Minguet and Achille Masson.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Pratique Photographique
with Maxime Guyon
This semester, students will explore how reflective surfaces transform our relationship to image and object. They become thresholds: what the object shows sometimes matters less than what its reflection reveals. Like a photosensitive material, they capture and replay the world, even embodying a form of technological and consumerist sterilization. Mirror-objects disrupt perception: as simulacra, they distort, double, multiply, or elude like a trompe-l’œil. They question what lies beyond the frame, showing what the object “sees” rather than what it is, and can become a space for self-reflection a mirror of their creator sometimes even fostering a narcissistic dimension.
PHOTOGRAPHY
CRÉATION PHOTOGRAPHIQUE
with Natacha Lesueur
Abracadabra! Starting with projects centered on a common theme, students develop their own in-depth work exploring the concept of “magic” in photography. They create a project that explores the relationship between reality and the imagination, using photography as a tool for revealing, transforming, and interpreting reality.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Applied Photography – 2026
with Calypso Mahieu
Le temps des Fleurs This course, which is both practical and technical, requires students to develop a true photographer’s eye. Its goal is to introduce students to, or help them refine their skills in various photographic genres, such as still life, portraiture, and architecture, as well as documentary and staged photography. These disciplines demand particular attention and great precision in the selection of models, locations, and objects. Mastery of composition, framing, and the management of light, whether natural or artificial, is essential for a successful shot. Throughout the course, students are guided to refine their observational skills and their ability to create images that are both precise and expressive.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
Screen Design – 2025
with Harry Bloch
Websites developed over the course of a semester based on books chosen by students, which they adapted into web experiences as part of Harry Bloch's Screen Design course, second year of the Bachelor's degree in Visual Communication.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Contextual Design – BA2 S1 2025
with Nicole Udry
Genius Loci, or the spirit of the place, refers to the unique identity or essence of a location. In architecture, this principle suggests that the specific characteristics of a place should be reflected and extended in a design. In the case of the second-year graphic design students, they have applied this principle to communication projects focused on promoting or extending the identity of a particular place through design. Their work likely explores how to visually capture and communicate the essence of a space, using graphic design elements that resonate with the architectural features or history of the place.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Type Design BA2 – S1 2025
with Aurèle Sack
Second-year students were required to manually develop the lowercase letters of two typefaces.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Visual Identity – BA2 S1 2025
with Adeline Mollard
As part of the visual identity course led by Adeline Mollard, students developed a visual identity starting from a randomly selected business card. By appropriating one of its graphic elements and its title, each project offers a unique interpretation. The identity is then expanded across a range of formats, from business cards to F4 posters, including posters, flyers, business cards, and an animated poster.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Editorial Design – BA2 S1 2025
with Diego Bontognali
As part of this editorial design course, students developed a research-based project focused on the selection and design of texts around a shared theme. Based on a curated set of sources, each project presents two editions with identical content, produced in both a large and a small format.
Arboricrop — Next generation agriculture using real-time information from tree crops
with Stéphane Halmaï-Voisard, Younès Klouche, Frederik Mahler-Andersen Pietro Alberti, Maxwell Ashford, Alain Bellet, Laurent Soldini
Arboricrop is a research project conducted by a multidisciplinary consortium bringing together Vivent Biosignals, Changins – University of Viticulture and Oenology, and ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (HES-SO), with the support of Innosuisse. Its objective is to develop a miniaturized plant electrophysiology sensor designed for use in real agricultural conditions: the VITA Mini Sensor.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Création d'image - Double Reading - BA1 2025-2026
with Guy Meldem
First-year students were invited to design a 16-page publication. By experimenting with duotone through various printing techniques, they structured a dual reading experience dependent on the printed colors.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Editorial Design - Great Expectations - BA1 S1 2025-2026
with Harry Bloch
During the editorial design course with Harry Bloch, the first-year students each laid out a chapter of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. A final edition compiling all the chapters was produced for the occasion.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Visual Identity - Cut & Paste - BA1 S1 2025-2026)
with Adeline Mollard
During the visual identity course, the 1st year of the Graphic Design bachelor had to carry out a poster project from a random event. They had to define their own visual system and explored a search for hand-made typographic posters. The visual identity of the event was developed through a poster and a flyer, accompanied by a research notebook grouping their entire creative process.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Type Design - BA1 S1 2025-2026
with Robert Huber
First-year students were invited to manually sketch the typographic skeleton of lowercase alphabet letters. The objective was to maintain the proportions, curves, and characteristic axes of each letter while paying close attention to visual coherence and consistency in the drawing.
DIGITAL EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Pixel Perfect – 2025
with Romain Collaud, Frederik Mahler-Andersen, Lara Défayes
Pixel Perfect is the semester project of the Interface Design orientation module, semester I. It invites students to put into practice the methods and principles introduced in the Macro UI and Screen Grammar courses, exploring how graphic systems structure the digital user experience. Based on the analysis of an existing website, the project encourages a critical and creative reinterpretation of its visual identity and hierarchy. The challenge is to design a contemporary, coherent and expressive interface capable of renewing the original design system while respecting its uses, content and functional constraints, as well as its key principles: consistency, modularity, and the scalability of graphic and interactive components.
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
Newspaper 2025-26
with Elric Petit
Newspaper is an industrial design project whose objective is to enable a personal stance on a topic of one’s choice. The project is based on an article taken from a newspaper or a specialized magazine, used as a conceptual and critical starting point. Through the analysis, interpretation, and translation of this written content, the project invites the development of a design reflection, questioning the issues, forms, and uses related to the chosen theme.
FILM STUDIES
Fiction Film Workshop with Marie-Elsa Sgualdo – 2026
with Marie-Elsa Sgualdo
The 2026 fiction film workshop for 2nd year students was lead by swiss director Marie-Elsa Sgualdo.
FILM STUDIES
Workshop Shitty Rigs
Workshop led by Michael William Farino, Jonathan Ricardo Argudo and Herbert Mayer and given to students in the Bachelor's degree programmes in Cinema and Industrial Design.
FILM STUDIES
Workshop with Benoît Dervaux
by Noé Bregnard, Eva Rust, Victor Durand Matinella, Lou Haenggi, Samuel Harari, Hana Magimel, Nolan Grando, Mileny Viera de Andrade, Zélia Zanone
Second-year Bachelor's students attended a workshop with Belgian cinematographer Benoît Dervaux, known for his work on the Dardenne brothers' films. He was responsible for the cinematography on the Swiss films Laissez-moi by Maxime Rappaz (2023) and À bras-le-corps by Marie-Elsa Sgualdo (2025).
DIGITAL EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Reality Check – 2025
with Emily Groves, Margherita Motta
Reality Check is a hands-on course that applies the theoretical foundations of the Human Lens module through real-world qualitative research and transforming insights into concrete design proposals. Students reimagined the human experience of digital services. Engaging with real people through interviews, diary studies and other research methods, they defined and prototyped new directions for existing services that bring meaningful experience to the fore.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2025 - MAP2
with Elisa Medde
This module assists the students to develop into a finalized work a project that further expands their interests and research. The module gives the opportunity to take some of the ideas, skills and themes explores in the first semester and make into a brand new work that can take any possible form: a book, an installation, an online project, a performance.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Soft Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP2
with Marco De Mutiis
The course, tutored by Marco De Mutiis, explored how emotions are being exploited and transformed by social media practices and aesthetics (e.g. influencer photography and CGI, operational beauty and weaponized cuteness), as well as through recent image technologies (e.g. generative AI platforms and text-to-image services).
PHOTOGRAPHY
Materialized Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP2
with Mazaccio & Drowilal
The purpose of this class is to examine the relationships between photography — in a context shaped by the digital — and its various modes of display. Students will have to consider what a photograph may be materially and explore how an image’s meaning is derived from both the mode of its distribution and the material form that it assumes. Although the final outcome has to include photography in a third dimensional way ( installation ), projects may use and combine image-based practices such as digital photography, collage, CGI, projection, printmaking, sculpture, objects, or performance, to encourage an expanded approach to photographic practice. The idea is to challenge the different types of engagement possible with pictures today.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Contemporary Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP1
with Clothilde Morette
The course explores the history of photography and related media through an approach that dissolves boundaries between academic and popular culture, and between photography and other artistic practices. Drawing on references from science, science fiction, literature, cinema, and the visual arts, students engage with a broad history of images from the early twentieth century to today. Based on key exhibitions of the Independent Group, the course introduces open themes such as technology, motion, and imagined worlds. Through research, appropriation, and the development of a mind-map accompanied by a theoretical text, students are encouraged to build connections across disciplines and reflect on the conceptual and narrative dimensions of their practice.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Applied Photography - Automne 2025 - MAP1
with Charles Negre, Milo Keller
The course focuses on developing the ability to respond to a commission within one’s own artistic practice, through an introduction to studio photography and constructed image-making. With an emphasis on still life, students refine their sensitivity to photographing and interpreting objects. Assignments revolve around transforming everyday objects into objects of desire, using the tools of commercial and product photography. Through styling, lighting, and visual storytelling, students explore how to reframe the ordinary as something compelling, working across both traditional and improvised studio setups.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2025 - MAP1
with Milo Keller
The course is a platform for the development of personal projects that arise from the desire and curiosity of each student. The basic concept of the work must be relevant to the field of contemporary photographic images. Each project can take a different form depending on the specificities, contents and inclinations of each participant. From books to multimedia installations, from performance to CGI, group discussions will articulate a plural vision of photography’s applications today.
FINE ARTS
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Vibrations Forward
with Joël Vacheron, Angelo Benedetto, Olympe Boutaghane, Francis Baudevin
Based on archives and experiences associated with Vibrations (1991–2013), this research analyses how the magazine's textual, graphic and photographic content provides insight into the challenges of communicating about popular music today.
(Re-)Viewing Paik – 2025
with Patrick Keller, François Bovier, Erika Marthins
A comparative and practice-based study on the transformative effects at play in the digital and hybrid exhibition of a body of non-digital native artworks (some artworks by artist Nam June Paik serving as a mean of understanding).
FINE ARTS
FINE ARTS
MA CI
The Assembly of Writings
with Federico Nicolao
A collective exploration of the new relations between contemporary writing and artistic practice.
Design for Recycling through Automation and Robotics in Apparel Accessories and Footwear
with Maxwell Ashford
This project develops design for recycling textile-based goods, one of the most damaging waste streams, using contemporary toolsets to dismantle products into pure fractions.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Lidia Molina González – Toilet Break Magazine
by Lidia Molina González
It all started with taking a break. A pause. A moment alone in a shared space: quiet, ordinary, a little strange. Toilets might not be the first place you’d look for big ideas, but that’s why we chose them. Toilet Break uses this overlooked space to explore how we live together, take space, and connect. This first issue is about in-betweens: between public and private, inside and outside. It gathers voices from Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, across generations and practices. A place where ideas circulate freely, where serious things can be said with a wink. A collective and personal space to test new editorial forms, listen more carefully, and believe in detours as a way forward. To take, quite literally, a moment to reflect and sit with things.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Flora Hayoz – FACE À FACE
by Flora Hayoz
FACE À FACE is an exploration of loneliness through two mediums: dance and graphic design. This project brings together two practices to give shape to a hybrid creation. On one hand, a choreographic piece co-choreographed with Gaia Menchini, centred on states of loneliness and then captured on video. The second medium is a publication that extends the piece. By questioning the book as an object, it is designed to be read by two people and becomes a tool for dialogue and listening. The publication thus diverts from its usual uses, creating a sensory experience. The two media interact with each other, inviting us to experience solitude both in movement and in the sharing of reading. Thus, FACE À FACE offers an experience where solitude becomes the starting point for an encounter.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Paul Paturel – Modulat – 2025 #2
by Paul Paturel
Grime Index is an interactive VJ-ing project that centralizes, visualizes, and enables navigation through iconic moments of grime — a chaotic genre born on London’s pirate airwaves. By turning audio data into visual identity and live signage, the project makes a performance-based, oral, and improvised culture more readable. Designed for both newcomers and longtime fans, it is built around three interchangeable modules — MC, instrumental, and lyrics — honoring the culture of sampling, MCing, and mixing. Diarization, transcription, dynamic typography, and real-time effects combine to reveal grime’s living and navigable memory.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Léa Corin – Neither Fully Free, Nor Fully Captive
by Léa Corin
Neither Fully Free, Nor Fully Captive explores the theme of day parole. Through a video installation and a book, this project archives and documents the activities of an association dedicated to reintegration. The projection, conceived as an emotional archive, combines experimental videos with sound testimonies from individuals on day parole supported by the association, revealing the complexity of this transition. The book, as a complement, adopts a documentary and sensitive approach, blending stories and visual creations. This project transcends graphic form to foster social dialogue and shed light on an essential yet often overlooked issue.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Marc Facchinetti – The Swiss Climate Report
by Marc Facchinetti
The Swiss Climate Report is an editorial design project that explores climate change through data. Based on recent meteorological records, put into perspective with historical averages sometimes dating back more than 150 years, the book is supported by plugins custom-developed for InDesign. These tools translate scientific data such as temperatures, UV radiation and Dobson units into typographic variations and ASCII forms. This experimental approach offers an alternative reading of climate information. The project offers a raw and precise computer graphics perspective.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Mathilde Driebold – Ce qu'il reste de nous
by Mathilde Driebold
This book exists for what remains of us—and perhaps, of you. Fragments of an intimate past inscribed in, and lost within, a social context that goes beyond us. This diploma project takes the form of an editorial narrative, blending personal stories and social archives. Through this work, I explore the traces left by addiction within a family setting, bringing individual and collective memory into dialogue. Ce qu'il reste de nous also demonstrates that graphic design can be used as a tool to question social realities, give shape to sensitive subjects, and break the silence.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Hugo Scholl – Modulat – 2025
by Hugo Scholl
MODULAT is a variable typeface designed around the concept of a musical visualizer. Starting from a neutral design, it branches out into multiple character sets, each allowing adaptation to different graphic and sonic worlds. Its variation axes enable it to adjust to a wide range of display formats, making it suitable for use across various digital platforms. Conceived as a modular tool, it questions how a typeface can accompany music while maintaining visual coherence. The project combines formal experimentation with a search for graphic adaptability.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Emilie Müller – Librarynth
by Emilie Müller
It is good to believe that the library is resilient. Not as a relic of the past, but as a presence that reinvents itself, oscillating between the tangible and the intangible. It's not a question of denying the digital, nor of clinging to our yellowed pages. But to understand that if we accept the library as a moving space, an organism that mutates with the times, then its future may not be so bleak. My diploma is a non-linear immersive library, conceived as a virtual house. Each piece evokes one of six themes from the Jan Michalski Foundation's Varia collection. In the form of a web interface, the project celebrates the serendipity inherent in physical libraries, while questioning how digital technology can translate the book experience.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Eliot Dubi – JUST IN CASE
by Eliot Dubi
At the individual level, we can neither predict nor prevent the next disaster; we can only arm ourselves with the right reflexes to face it. JUST IN CASE is a website that gathers, through four scenarios — large wildfires, dam failures, industrial accidents and earthquakes — the key actions to remember when everything turns upside down. A clear tree-like navigation, concise texts and flat-style illustrations keep learning accessible without resorting to sensationalism. A triptych of posters promotes the site to the wider public. Designed for a generation flooded with anxiety-fuelled alerts, the project turns worry into simple, immediate actions — just in case.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Coraline Beyeler – 5R
by Coraline Beyeler
5R is a documentary book explores the contrast between urban and rural agriculture, focusing on developments driven by new generations. It addresses issues related to pollution as well as social, health, and economic challenges.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Delphine Brantschen – What Remains to Be Stitched
by Delphine Brantschen
What Remains to Be Stitched is an interactive website shaped as a memory palace. Through her mother's oral accounts, the graphic designer weaves together Brazil's past into 3D icons and narrative fragments. No objects or images have been preserved from this life — only words. These words are my only inheritance. But what remains when even she no longer remembers them? Blending graphic design, modeling, point clouds and spatial storytelling, the project explores a poetic form of transmission, stitching memories to preserve a fragile link between memory, culture and identity.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Candice Aepli – Brindille et Azilise
by Candice Aepli
Brindille et Azilise invite you to imagine children's space differently, by offering a lively, playful universe in their bedrooms. Here, the story is not read between the pages, but lies on the floor and climbs up the windows. It slips under an arm. It tucks in dreams. It's a whole world at children's level, where ecosystems come to life through furniture, transforming everyday life into a playground for exploration. Le jardin, collection no. 1 The gardener has slipped seeds into the soil, the bright sun warms the petals, the mouse nibbles on the sly, and in this corner full of life, everyone is busy and smiling.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Diego Steiner – Hybrid Modules
by Diego Steiner
Hybrid Modules explores the link between traditional craftsmanship and contemporary technologies through the creation of a 3D-printed modular typographic tool for use with a manual letterpress. Designed on a grid, the modular alphabet becomes a set of physical dies, which can be inserted by hand into the press. The slow, repetitive process becomes an integral part of the visual language, making visible the time and care of the gesture. A series of A2 posters promotes a series of fictitious conferences entitled “ART, CRAFT & TECHNOLOGY - Guests in Switzerland”.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Cyprien Valenza – Patterna
by Cyprien Valenza
Patterna is an experimental variable typeface designed around two axes: Weight and Weaving. Inspired by Cassandre's Bifur from the 1930s and the arrangement of threads on Jacquard looms, Patterna is based on a rigorous grid that structures shapes and spacing. Its modular layering system allows for graphic experimentation with variations, making each composition dynamic. Numerous alternates reinforce its formal richness. Patterna challenges fashion conventions by offering a modular, dense typeface designed as both a graphic tool and a writing system.