Announcing the 2025 Design Writing Prize Winner

Awards

16 September, 2025

We are delighted to announced that Rosa te Velde, theory tutor at the MA Industrial Design department at KABK, is the winner of the 2025 Design Writing Prize.

Rosa’s work – ‘A Firm Nudge’: Politics of ‘Ethical’ Reform through ‘Native Arts and Crafts’ in Dutch-Occupied Indonesia – was written as part of a research project on design and the ethnographic museum commissioned by the Research Center for Material Culture in Leiden, the Netherlands. The article was republished through the Recall/Recalibrate platform, where you can also find other articles on arts and crafts and education in the context of ‘ethical imperialism'.

https://recalibrate.nl/a-firm-nudge
https://www.instagram.com/recall.recalib/

Our guest judge, Elizabeth Guffey, Professor emerita in Art History at the State University of New York, Purchase College, commented that:

‘The essay offers a welcome and overdue exploration of a subject that, while touched on in the literature, remains surprisingly underexamined and in clear need of deeper historical analysis…In terms of design history, this layered approach enhances our understanding of both the local and global stakes of colonial governance and development. For its originality, scholarly depth, and contribution to the field, I believe this article is highly deserving of recognition’.

Congratulations Rosa!