The 2025 Degree Show at Glasgow School of Art unveils a dynamic collection of student projects tackling urgent contemporary issues—from climate anxiety to urban segregation and digital overload. Spanning disciplines such as architecture, communication design, interior design, and immersive systems, these works reflect the School’s commitment to radical experimentation, deep craft, and design for social impact.
Reimagining environments: learning, dying, detoxing
A number of this year’s standout projects push the boundaries of how we occupy space—emotionally, socially, and architecturally. Journey of the Senses by interior design student Zhuoer Zhong presents a floating biomaterials education centre housed within a repurposed ferry. Designed as a multi-sensory platform for ecological learning, the venue travels between cities along the River Clyde, offering workshops on mushroom bricks and sensory exhibitions aimed at promoting sustainable thinking through active participation. This mobile project embraces adaptability and collective learning while rooting itself in place through recurring visits and local engagement.
Similarly, Sophia Cavalluzzi’s The Search Engine transforms a disused railway tunnel into a futuristic digital detox centre. Divided into zones named after anatomical parts—the heart, lungs, trachea—the facility blends symbolism with experiential design, offering various levels of digital disengagement. Users journey through one-kilometre meditative walks or engage in ambient communal spaces. Rather than retreating from technology, the project confronts digital dependency with spatial interventions that are accessible, immersive, and emotionally restorative.
In O Parque Dos Mortos – An Architecture of Changing Perceptions, Emelie Fraser tackles another oft-neglected spatial typology: architecture for death. The proposal critiques Porto’s segregated burial systems and introduces an architectural “spine” of walled gardens that dignify mortality. Blending natural decay, civic memory, and ritual, Fraser’s work repositions death not as an isolated event, but as a deeply human process deserving of sensitive integration into our cities.
Intersecting identity and community
Identity, both individual and cultural, forms the basis for several of this year’s projects. In Shades, Jessie Orville addresses the long-standing lack of inclusivity in the beauty industry for people of mixed heritage. Her space challenges the product-centric norm of retail environments, instead proposing a person-focused model with tactile swatches, personalised consultations, and advisors of shared cultural background. Designed to empower confidence and encourage storytelling, Shades is both a prototype and a manifesto for a more inclusive commercial landscape.
Architectural student Joseph Michael Collins Crawley delves into Beijing’s historic Hutong neighbourhoods with Beyond the Moongate, a thoughtful investigation into segregation and cultural erosion. Rooted in the Siheyuan housing typology, Crawley reimagines these enclosed courtyard homes as hubs of communal regeneration. His thesis proposes architectural interventions that preserve the essence of Hutongs while upgrading infrastructure and sanitation—revitalising them not just as relics, but as living systems of memory and care.
Meanwhile, Hannah Teale’s Wild Adornment draws from decorative arts, museum collections, and natural history to reimagine textile design through the animal kingdom. Her embroidered works use maximalist colour and bold motifs to celebrate biodiversity, heritage, and storytelling. Each piece blends environmental awareness with a deep appreciation for historical craft and is intended for commercial interiors that embrace both spectacle and substance.
Environmental narratives through motion and medium
The urgency of the climate crisis underpins several works in the 2025 showcase. In Connecting to the Climate Crisis, Jem Mitchell presents a kinetic installation that visualises climate change through movement. Anchored by a sobering statistic—that people in the Northern Hemisphere would need to shift northward by 1.15 metres per day to maintain consistent temperatures—Mitchell constructs household objects that move at this glacial but relentless pace. The quiet, mechanical motions of the objects contrast with the growing anxiety around environmental collapse, offering a poetic yet piercing reflection on the slow violence of climate change.
Upasana Chadha’s Entangled addresses the environmental devastation caused by ghost nets—discarded industrial fishing gear responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of marine mammals each year. Through a 100-page publication, Chadha transforms the mundane texture of fruit nets into symbols of entrapment and ecological loss. Her mono-printed textures become metaphors for human impact and marine suffering, blurring boundaries between graphic design, environmental storytelling, and activism.
Immersive experiences and digital storytelling
Blending architecture with virtual space, Piet Lages’s Monument offers a fully immersive first-person horror environment exploring obsession and decay. Created using Unity, Blender, and Substance Painter, the project simulates an art installation gone rogue—free from reality, consumed by madness. With moody lighting, corrupted spatial logic, and meticulously crafted assets, Monument showcases how immersive systems design can provoke both emotional unease and aesthetic curiosity.
Sandy Greig’s Film City Central continues the thread of creative production by proposing a hub for Glasgow’s growing film scene. The design integrates screening rooms, set-building spaces, and a virtual production wall, facilitating both live audience engagement and film creation. Set within Govan’s industrial architecture, the project leverages underutilised urban fabric to re-energise Glasgow’s cinematic culture. Greig’s approach also repositions architecture as an enabler of storytelling, offering spaces that are as flexible as they are narratively rich.
A new generation of impact-driven designers
The Glasgow School of Art’s 2025 Degree Show reveals not only the technical sophistication of its graduates but also their moral and imaginative clarity. Across disciplines, students are interrogating the systems we live in—from housing and healthcare to consumption and digital culture—and reimagining them with care, creativity, and criticality.
As the school notes, this cohort demonstrates a deep commitment to hybrid practices, where digital innovation meets tactile making, and where aesthetics serve community, ecology, and well-being. Whether through biomaterial education centres, digital detox tunnels, or speculative death architecture, these students are forging a design culture rooted in empathy, experimentation, and ecological intelligence.
Their projects ask: What does it mean to design for the world we want, rather than the world we’ve inherited? The answers may begin here—in tunnels, ferries, textiles, and virtual landscapes—crafted by the Glasgow School of Art’s next generation of change-makers.
