The Budapest Design Week is Hungary’s leading showcase of the creative sector. This year’s theme, “Fluid Boundaries”, highlights the blurring of disciplinary lines and the importance of collaboration and crossover. MOME’s events reflect this idea, revisiting key milestones in Hungarian design while responding to contemporary challenges and questions shaping the future. 

The Passages exhibition is for anyone curious to see where design is heading. Showcasing the work of students from MOME’s Product Design BA and Design MA programmes, it centres on the idea that today, design is less about traditional expertise and more about pushing boundaries – seeking connections across fields and building bridges between science and art, intuition and aesthetics. Experimentation is a recurring theme throughout the exhibition, alongside a strong research focus, revealing how theory and practice, the artificial and the natural, the abstract and the tangible influence one another, and how their interplay can create inspiring synergies. 

The selection highlights the wide spectrum that product design spans today, from furniture, toys, and vehicle concepts, to objects designed to improve the hospital experience, from course projects to masterworks. Highlights include Ádám Csesznok’s Mercedes-Benz Solitude concept, an elegant open-top sports car that recalls the elegance of the 1930s, exploring new directions in the brand’s design language, and Sára Fruzsina Nagy’s Novu porcelain set, built around the logic of dividing forms, combining elegance with functionality. Other notable projects are Gergely István Szabó’s Inas valet stand, which reinterprets the Thonet tradition in a compact, contemporary piece, and Johanna Dezső and Bence Váradi’s Wingo e-scooter concept, a new approach to airport transport that offers an efficient, easily integrated way to carry two passengers and their luggage. 

The exhibition design at Bäse was created by a group of exhibiting students and alumni, supported by instructor Dániel Lakos.  Taking place on 11 October, the opening will include a roundtable discussion and a guided tour.  

The flagship event of the Budapest Design Week, the 360 Design exhibition once again brings together the very best of contemporary design, celebrating the power of collaborative thinking and interconnected stories. With the theme “Design Aligns – Creating Together, Living Connected” at its core, it features a wide range of works by MOME students and alumni, along with fascinating design history showcases linked to the university’s past. 

A particular point of pride for the Product Design programmes is the Up-and-Coming Designers category that many of the exhibiting students entered individually. The showcase features a rich array of furniture, textiles, and interior design pieces, including Panka Fehérvári’s Urban Fossil project, an experimental material study combining ceramics and industrial metal to create tangible imprints of the urban environment; and Bernadett Garai’s two furniture concepts – ZIP, a tubular steel armchair-bed that blends comfort with storage in a compact form, and MUTI, a modular, multifunctional unit that works equally well as a nightstand, shelf, stool, or side table. Virág Besenyei’s Teddrack set offers an ergonomic, easily adaptable workspace for children aged two to ten, designed for use in kitchen settings. The exhibition also presents works by Zsófi Antalóczy, Henriett Barabás, Levente Buzás, Johanna Dezső, Nóra Frankó, Csenge Zsófia Hutter, Balázs Kiss, Sára Fruzsina Nagy, Panna Őri, Boldizsár Racsmány, Gergely Szabó, Janka Szalay-Bobrovniczky, Emese Thamó, Bence Váradi, and Mátyás Zagiba, demonstrating how the latest generation of designers approaches usability, functional adaptability, and sustainability, while also reflecting on the social dimensions of design. 

Making its debut in Hungary at 360 Design and first presented in Brussels last year, the exhibition is dedicated to the oeuvre of architect and designer Sándor Borz Kováts, which includes the first catamaran on Lake Balaton, as well as designs for a music school, university campus, tubular steel and fibreglass furniture, modular lighting systems, and even boutiques in the 1960s. 

In 2023, MOME students first explored the legacy of iconic alumnus, instructor, and later assistant lecturer at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts Borz Kováts under the guidance of designer and teacher András Kerékgyártó DLA, and curator and concept owner of the exhibition Judit Horváth PhD. During the course, students made a thorough assessment of Borz Kováts' works in the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts, made a video of GIFs modelling the structure of these objects, and created a 1:7 scale mockup of the 1970s Borz Kováts exhibition held at the academy. 

A companion exhibition curated by co-curator of the 360 Design show Dr Judit Horváth features selected pieces from the Central Collection of the Hungarian National Museum and the Hungarian Museum of Applied Arts collection by former and current lecturers of the former College of Applied Arts (today MOME) – including interior designers Sándor Mikó and László Juhász, as well as product designers Dániel Lakos and András Kerékgyártó – reinforcing the continuity of MOME’s design story across generations. 

This year’s Budapest Design Week also features a number of events organised by the Museum of Applied Arts, many involving MOME instructors. Glass artist and master instructor Gergely Pattantyús will give a talk titled Craft Tradition in Contemporary Glass Art, presenting the outcomes of the Social-Glass Design Symposium, which explored traditional glassblowing techniques and their contemporary reinterpretations. Guided tours of the Ráth György Villa’s permanent exhibition will be led by ceramic artists and MOME instructors Edit Kondor DLA and Péter Kemény DLA, whose works have recently been added to the museum’s collection. 

At the Budapest Design Week, MOME presents the diversity of its entire design education, from emerging talents to established designers, from historical foundations to future directions. The guided tours build bridges across generations, while several exhibitions open up dialogue between different fields, sparking new insights and unexpected perspectives. Together, these events reaffirm MOME’s role as a driving force in Hungarian design – a place where product design draws on a 145-year legacy and, in the spirit of László Moholy-Nagy, continues to build new worlds in response to the challenges of the 21st century.