Serious performance, delivered with a wink

I want to know why it needs to look that way at all.

I’m Sabrina Ritz (*2003), based in Zurich, trained Mediamatikerin / Media Technologist, now a BA Spatial Design student at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.

Before Spatial Design, I spent two years as a Lead Designer on cross-departmental projects for Stadt Zürich. From family-services campaigns to experience-driven projects like the VBZ Wein-Tram, I was reaching thousands of people monthly, each with a measurable lift in the numbers. I worked directly with the Zurich City Council within months of finishing my apprenticeship, leading across departments with competing priorities to get high-stakes work actually shipped. What that actually taught me: a carefully crafted visual message can only carry a system so far. The real leverage sits further upstream. I got tired of patching from the outside — so I went to fix it from the inside.

I can’t look at one thing without seeing what it’s tangled up in. Before I commit to a direction, I’ve usually already traced what it sets off three moves later. The macro matters to me as much as the micro — the system, the incentives, the context. That’s why I stay with a project end to end: concept, workshop, pitch, execution. Whatever the problem actually needs, because the format should follow the idea, not the other way around. I’m a strategist who happens to be able to build anything — and with taste.

I’m interested in the full spectrum of how space treats people, from the overlooked to the everyday. On one end: spaces built for people society would rather not look at, like Zurich’s Kontakt- und Anlaufstellen or the Dutch dementia villages, where the environment is redesigned around the person instead of the stigma. On the other: the small details that quietly make an airport or transit system feel human rather than just functional — crowd flow, safety, extravagant details that elevate an ordinary interaction. Space is rarely neutral; it shapes how people experience both crisis and everyday life. That range is deliberate. Solving something real matters to me, but meaningful and fancy don’t have to be opposites.

Design, for me, is a catalyst; the thing that gets a better system moving. Underneath all of it is a fair amount of love — I don’t know how to do this work halfway.