Hasta La Ideas

Promotion: design platform What Design Can Do has announced its Redesign Everything Challenge, calling designers to submit ideas that “radically redesign our world”.

Redesign Everything Challenge is the fifth competition run in collaboration with the IKEA Foundation and invites international designers to present products, materials, systems or services that intend to tackle critical global issues such as climate change.

The competition is open from 17 January to 13 March 2024 and the winners will see their designs turned into reality and win €5,000 in funding.

The initiative emphasises the need for circular and regenerative solutions and aims to answer the question: what role can designers play in the transition to a fair and circular future?

What Design Can Do intends for the competition to prompt designers to use their “radical imaginations” and design creative solutions that tackle crises in food, fashion and packaging, construction, mobility, digital services or electronics.

“Redesigning everything is first and foremost a call to action,” said What Design Can Do co-founder Richard van der Laken. “It’s also an invitation to think laterally about how our world should be redesigned, in ways both big and small.”

“Now, more than ever, there is an urgent need for inclusive and circular solutions, and for the transformative and disruptive power of design,” he continued.

The competition is a bid to showcase how projects that humanity currently faces are interconnected, for example, biodiversity loss in the Amazon, the housing crisis in the Netherlands and plastic waste in Kenya.

What Design Can Do believes that the solutions to current issues “cut across various sectors and disciplines” and that designers have a critical window of opportunity to reduce carbon emissions.

“In the face of our planet’s greatest challenges, design emerges as a powerful catalyst for change,” said IKEA Foundation head of planet Liz McKeon. “The What Design Can Do design challenges that we supported have led to tangible impacts in climate action, health and wellbeing, and social justice all around the world.”

“This demonstrates that designers can become the architects of solutions, building a bridge between imagination and impactful change, and have the transformative ability to shape a sustainable future,” McKeon added.

In April 2024 a jury of experts in climate action, design and social impact will select 10 winners. In addition to winning €5,000 in funding and seeing their designs turned into reality, winners will receive online training and mentoring sessions with experts to strengthen their projects. Winners will also have the opportunity to speak at What Design Can Do events.

What Design Can Do was launched in 2011 and is an international platform that champions design as a tool for social change. The platform addresses pressing societal and environmental issues and has hosted 15 successful conferences in Amsterdam, São Paulo, and México City.

In 2016, it launched the design challenge programme that aims to connect the creative and design communities with urgent social issues such as climate change and refugees’ wellbeing.

The IKEA Foundation is a strategic philanthropy dedicated to tackling poverty and climate change, which it says are the two biggest issues that affect children’s futures. Since 2009, the foundation has granted more than €2 billion to improve quality of life while fighting climate change.

For more information and to participate in the Redesign Everything Challenge, visit WDCD’s website.

Partnership content

This article was written by Dezeen for What Design Can Do as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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