The only university in Switzerland to offer specific bachelor’s and master’s degree courses in jewellery, watch and accessory design, HEAD Geneva can be proud of the large number of its graduates whose work as jewellery designers has earned them international acknowledgement and teaching posts around the world. The cornerstone of a jewellery design tradition known as the Geneva School, HEAD Geneva remains a key source of innovation in this field. Rooted in a centuries-old tradition of outstanding know-how in the art and use of precious metals, the current course focuses on jewellery design, but also covers accessories and objects associated with the bodies of super-modern individuals (to borrow a favourite term of Marc Augé’s). Our array of everyday objects maintains close links with the traditional functions of jewellery, and with the material, technical and conceptual conditions for its production. Mobile phones, spectacles, key-rings, pens, headsets, watches and handbag or mobile phone jewellery – just like classic jewellery – all have a variety of uses and convey polysemic messages. This ‘new’, intrinsic jewellery is a vector of meaning in the performativity of the self in the world. It plays a fundamental role: symbolic in rituals, identity-related in social exchanges. Part of an artistic, design and fashion culture, it is a vector of growth for a whole area of industry and the economy. These are tomorrow’s assets, even though based on yesterday’s – and this is well illustrated by the work of the five young designers at the Maison Tavel, who revisit ancient techniques in the light of contemporary aesthetic issues, the hand and the brain.