Hyundai Awards for Excellence in Sustainability and Creative Practice

Inspiration Award: Ramaa Rajesh Sahasrabuddhe (MA Information Experience Design, 2025) for Soil Memory

Soil Memory is an audio-tactile experience that explores how pivotal historical events have shaped soil health in London. It is presented as a timeline of woven soil tapestries and invites audiences to engage with and embody the memory of the soil. The piece creates a tactile experience that embodies the look, feel and texture of soil. Pieces of yarn and cloth weave together to form six ‘soil tapestries’, alongside a poetic audio narrative which connects and tells the stories of the pieces, building empathy with the natural world around us.

Innovation Award – Arabella Calla (MA Design Products, 2025) for Sweet Cheeks Nappies

Sweet Cheeks Nappies is a regenerative hybrid system designed to tackle the environmental crisis of nappy waste and the toxic chemicals found in conventional nappies, such as SAPs, polypropylene, and polyethylene that pose risks to infant health. Each disposable insert is made entirely from biodegradable, skin-safe, and natural materials, including agricultural waste product fibres and two other patent-pending plant-based ingredients. Unlike conventional nappies that rely on plastic components and petroleum-derived SAPs, Sweet Cheeks uses no synthetics, no chemicals, no plastics, and decomposes to create fertiliser.

Aesthetics and Craft Award: Adriette Myburgh (MA Sculpture, 2025) for Vanishing Point to Invert the World through Six Apples

This work is a sculptural installation and speculative thought-experiment. It poses the question – if we can imagine energy generated from six apples and two oranges, through symbolic transformation rather than extraction, then we already possess the cognitive tools to rethink sustainability from the ground up.

Through sculpture, installation, and diagrammatic drawing, the work configures alternative blueprints for more responsive and responsible futures. If we grant that even something as ordinary as six apples holds the potential for infinite transformation, then the question is no longer how to extract more, but how to think otherwise: how to reorganise energy, matter, and value so that their force is directed towards renewal rather than depletion. This shift requires new ecologies of thought as much as new technologies of making.

Inspiration Award: Paul Baule (MA Digital Direction) for WOOD YOU

WOOD YOU is an immersive installation that combines historic satellite imagery of deforestation in the Amazon with 3D animation and acoustic interaction. Depending on the acoustic intensity of an audio trigger, each of these nine video-playheads will jump back and forth in time, showing the year-by-year change of selected deforestation sites between 1985 and 2020.

Each piece displays largely intact forest areas when the audience is quiet and reveals varying patterns of cleared farmland as ambient noise increases. It is up to each visitor to decide how to interact with the work, how to relate to the displayed forest/deforestation, and consequently, how the forest/deforestation responds to their presence.

Innovation Award - Ankita Khanna (MA Design Products) and Yohaan Kukreja (MA/MSc Innovation Design Engineering) for the project RAW Materials (Renewable Agricultural Waste)

RAW Materials (Renewable Agricultural Waste) is a rice straw-derived, biodegradable composite and sheet material for the fashion industry. It responds to the problem of rice straw burning, a practice that takes place in Punjab, India, and leads to the burning of 21 million tons of rice straw annually. This creates severe air pollution, with the air quality index (AQI) often exceeding 400 in the country, and results in significant health issues, economic losses, and soil degradation. 

This project aims to reduce rice straw burning by up to 30% in the next five years, as well as offering a sustainable alternative to synthetic materials in footwear production. It transforms agricultural waste into valuable products that can be mass-produced and easily integrated into existing manufacturing processes. The approach goes beyond creating eco-friendly materials by reshaping the supply chain to prioritise sustainability.

Aesthetics and Craft Award: Kahee Jeong (MA Painting) for Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

This project was born from the lockdown necessity of painting at home, rather than in a studio. Before the pandemic, Kahee Jeong primarily used oil paints and solvents that could be harmful to the environment. Being forced to paint only at home without a suitable disposal system prompted Kahee to change painting materials to non-toxic mediums, including self-made dyes from food waste and natural sources that would not be harmful to humans or the environment when disposed of. 

This project uses the natural, handmade paints in interactive and smudged images on raw canvas and reused objects. This practice reflects Jeong's dual background as an artist and pharmacist, striving for sustainability through eco-friendly artwork and minimising environmental impact in the creative process.

Inspiration Award: Ella Nartey (Interior Design MA, 2023) for WASTE NOT

WASTE NOT aims to re-evaluate our view on waste and our reliance on traditional raw materials within the design industry. By designing a zero-waste restaurant, sustainable brand and developing a number of biomaterials using food waste and by-products, Ella aims to promote sustainable material innovation and circular design within the built environment, whilst celebrating waste as a resource.

Innovation Award: Qing Duan (Interior Design MA, 2023) for Future Farm

In Qing’s vision of the future farm, hydroponic systems, LED lighting, rainwater storage, energy diversion, and solar panels work together to create a recycling system of permaculture.

Aesthetics and Craft Award: Eileen White (Print MA, 2023) for Symbiosis

Eileen White asks what the role of the artist in the age of the Anthropocene is. Working in the field of photography, Eileen has developed reciprocal ways of working that are slow and mindful. Transforming homemade, grown, recycled or waste materials into alternative, non-toxic, darkroom chemicals or printing substrates enables Eileen to use a low tech, sustainable, cost-effective and safe approach to art making; something which has become a form of environmental activism.

Inspiration Category

• Natasha Redina, Leaning into the Unknown
• Catherine Ward, What Remains
• Ramaa Rajesh Sahasrabuddhe, Soil Memory

Innovation Category

• Dassa Shalev, Landscape Laboratories
• Jinhak Lee, Manu
• Arabella Calla, Sweet Cheeks Nappies

Aesthetics & Craft Category

• Emma Goring, Reefscape
• S.O.S - Save our Seas, Ruwanthi Gajadeera
• Vanishing Point to Invert the World Through Six Apples, Adriette Myburgh

Inspiration Category

• Sohom Mandal, Entropy
• Paul Baule, WOOD YOU
• Joanna Cohn, All that I am
• Aiduo Xiao, Clothing Bank
• Hugo Garcia, Resinero

Innovation Category

• Jialu Hou, Yate Xiang, Oasis Facade - Sculptural Energy-Free Cooling Module
• Yun Chen, Jialu Hou, Tao Xu, Kengo Horikoshi, HarvesTints
• Ankita Khanna, Yohaan Kukreja, RAW Materials (Renewable Agricultural Waste)
• Markos Georgiou, HYDRA
• Dawoon Yim, Ching Hang Ng, Claire Lee, Watanya Aekplakorn, Ruyi Yu, HabiTide

Aesthetics & Craft Category

• Victor Guerin, Fragile Beauty
• Kahee Jeong, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
• Jiaqi Chen, THE STATE OF DECAY
• Xuechen Wang, Stability Seeking
• Gaby Mlynarczyk, "Heima"

Inspiration Category

• Sam Joseph, The Aesthetics of Tomorrow(s) Landfill
• Wei Zhag, The Biochar Tile
• Ella Nartey, WASTE NOT

Innovation Category

• Yiyuan Bai, SOLE
• Darren Bartholomew, Empowering access to Design Technology and Education
• Qing Duan, FUTURE FARM
• Priyanshu Mukhopadhyay, Channi
• Emma Money, Cyanoskin

Aesthetics & Craft Category

• Joanne Lamb, Imbolc Collection
• Eileen White, Symbiosis
• Dilan Karatas, Brick by Brick
• Shafina Jaffer, Creation of Eden