These are just some of the questions addressed by the masterworks featured in the 2025 Diploma Exhibition of the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME). This year’s graduates explore global and societal challenges through the lens of design and art, with works spanning four major themes: the climate crisis, social innovation, dignified care and healthcare, and the future of cultural heritage in an ever-accelerating world.  

Open to the public and free of charge, the exhibition will run for a full week from 14 to 20 June at the Zugligeti Road campus. Student projects across ten MA programmes – from prototypes and models to immersive installations – each provide a window into the minds of graduating students while also reflecting how MOME’s emerging research labs are taking shape to meet 21st-century challenges. The projects are as diverse as they are thought-provoking, often presenting unexpected, cross-disciplinary responses to social and environmental dilemmas that defy easy categorisation. 

One such project is Furniture Rescue by Architecture MA student Borbála Véghelyi, who explores how the definition of ‘waste’ is shaped by context. Her vision rethinks Budapest’s bulk waste collection system as part of an urban reuse network, with collection hubs and repair workshops set up in abandoned buildings. Her diploma work focuses on the transformation of the Dob Street transformer station and its integration into the urban fabric. 

Photography MA student Daniella Grinberg explores ecological issues through her project Fieldwork Laboratory, previously debuted at the Budapest Photo Festival. Using photography as a tool for reflection, she examines the contradictory and often absurd outcomes of human attempts to dominate nature, with a focus on hybrid spaces such as apiaries, museums, and exotic pet shops. 

Design MA student Bulcsú Berzsák proposes a contemporary tea set that helps people reconnect with nature and integrate medicinal herbs into everyday routines. Likewise, Design MA student Máté Guthy’s Sola fruit dryer modernises an age-old preservation technique. Crafted from paper and powered by sunlight, this seasonal, biodegradable item encourages a slower pace of living while offering an eco-conscious alternative for home food drying. 

The tension between cultural preservation and our increasingly accelerated lifestyles runs through several of the projects. Graphic Design MA student Zsuzsanna Réka Gábor explores the question of which types of data are truly worth keeping in an age of exponential digital growth. Her speculative design project Omit experiments with conscious forgetting as a design strategy, featuring a temporary data-storage device that eventually breaks down or transforms in a natural way. 

Animation MA student Ráhel Réka Gáti diploma film follows the story of a five- or six-year-old girl, offering a quiet reflection on how our lives are shaped by the experiences of previous generations. It deals with transgenerational trauma and the recurring patterns that often play out within families. 

Inspired by the original Szarvas lamp, Design MA student Nóra Szilágyi presents a lamp collection inspired by the original Szarvas design, built from compatible, easy-to-manufacture components using a sustainable production process. The pieces create playful lighting effects, highlighting the Szarvas lamp’s signature metal-pressed silhouettes, placing them in a new context that blends tradition and contemporary design. 

The idea of preservation can extend beyond objects to entire landscapes, as shown in Design Theory MA student Réka Vass’s A Region as a Museum – Mapping the Eco-Museum Potential of the Szent György Hill Cultural Landscape, a research project that maps out a vision for an eco-museum in the Szent György Hill region. Her model integrates natural and cultural heritage into a dynamic, collaborative framework that connects tradition with the present day. 

Designer-Maker MA student Sára Szeredi approaches the idea of cuteness from an unusual angle, drawing on ancient Egyptian faience animal figurines to identify its underlying visual logic. Her project features a set of items inspired by ancient faience figurines, each one designed to jolt the viewer out of time, and offering a brief escape from the constant illusion of serious adult life. A different take on the same theme comes from Fashion and Textile Design MA student Éva Krisztina Vass, who examines how cuteness has become part of adult clothing. Her project asks where the line falls between childhood expression and infantilism, and how this aesthetic makes its way into fashion. Design Theory MA student Róza Julianna Tomka takes an in-depth look at the polka-dot ball – an object that has remained virtually unchanged since the early 1950s and become a symbol of childhood across cultures. Her research set out to uncover the source of its enduring popularity and relevance. 

Fashion and Textile Design MA student Eszter Kain explores cultural heritage and the stereotypes surrounding women’s roles. Her knitted collection portrays key milestones in the female life cycle – from birth to death – drawing on the white figures of Hungarian folk tradition not merely as decorative motifs, but as symbols of transformation and communal memory. 

Media Design MA student Flóra Zelenai explores a powerful theme in her installation, built around the preserving jar that has become a symbol within the Swabian community of Pilisvörösvár. During the expulsions, preserving jars were often the only belongings families could sell for money – turning them into quiet icons of loss and survival. The work pays tribute to a community whose history has largely been left out of mainstream narratives. At first glance, the jars appear empty, but when touched, vibrations pass through the glass from one person to another, carrying personal memories and untold stories. 

Art and Design Management student Emese Bukovinszky addresses modern-day slavery in the form of domestic servitude in Hungary, proposing an action plan developed using the toolkit of social design.  

The Painter of Sadness, an evocative walking simulator by Interaction Design MA student Dávid Straff, invites players into worlds reshaped by the quiet weight of lost time. The game draws blurred lines between dream and reality, experienced through the eyes of Orlin, who finds himself in a liminal space, where unspoken traumas echo quietly as the soul searches for closure.  Designed as an emotional and introspective journey, the experience gently encourages reflection, interpretation, and a deeper engagement with the fading world of memory.  

Drawing on her own experience, Jewellery and Metal Design MA student Virág Luca Boncz translates personal experiences of anxiety and panic disorder into tactile form. Her project includes a patchwork quilt made from leaflets for sedatives and sleeping pills, as well as a sleep masks assembled from medications – objects that embody the silent labour of emotional survival. 

Interaction Design MA student Zsófia Pregun has developed an integrated, smart diagnostic ecosystem for ophthalmology. It connects slit lamps, OCT scanners and other medical equipment to artificial intelligence via a digital health card, linking with both the national medical database and the existing electronic health records system. This forward-looking concept complements the research and diploma project of Design student Nikola Mrkobrad, who explores the potentials of personalised eyewear design. His masterwork, Morph Specs. presents a customisable, on-demand spectacle frame.   

Design and Visual Arts Teacher MA student Evu Szabó diploma work explores the role of AI-based image generators in art education, looking at how these tools could be integrated into teaching in a conscious and ethical way, and proposes the development of online resources to support educators in doing so. 

In the years ahead, graduates will be able to explore themes of ecology, heritage, social issues, and care in even more depth as part of MOME’s dedicated Labs, potentially continuing their work in these areas as researchers. Walking through the campus, it feels genuinely great to see the masterworks present fresh perspectives, critical insight, and well-founded research, all pointing towards real ways of tackling today’s global and local challenges.