Redesign Everything Challenge

Details

What Design Can Do launches the Redesign Everything Challenge in partnership with the IKEA Foundation. With this global design competition, WDCD seeks creative solutions to address the climate crisis and kickstart the transition to a fair and circular future. Until 13 March 2024, changemakers everywhere are invited to submit ideas to radically redesign the world — products, materials, stories, systems, services and spaces — through a circular and regenerative lens. At the end of the open call, at least 10 winning teams will enter an international accelerator programme to strengthen and scale the impact.

Why this challenge now?
WDCD believes that designers have a meaningful role to play in climate action. Many of the problems faced are deeply interconnected, whether it be plastic waste in Kenya or the housing crisis in the Netherlands. Fortunately, the same holds true for our solutions, too. In this light, tackling the climate crisis is a matter of not just working smarter or harder — but together — and applying pressure from as many different angles as possible.

That is why this year — as the planet enters an era of global ‘boiling’ — WDCD throws the door wide open and launches their most expansive challenge yet. “Redesign Everything is first and foremost a call to action,” explained WDCD co-founders Richard van der Laken and Pepijn Zurburg. “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, circular and regenerative solutions, and for the transformative, disruptive and healing power of design.”

Where can designers make the biggest difference?
Tackling the climate crisis means changing how the economy works (and how it doesn’t). No sector can do this alone — but designers can make an impact by shifting from linear to circular ways of making, using and living. Next to this, the most important role of design is that of radical imagination: seeing what does not yet exist, making ideas real, and forging ahead with optimism. That is why for this competition, WDCD is looking for creative climate solutions that cut across various sectors and disciplines. This includes new and existing enterprises that address issues like waste and biodiversity loss, as well as conceptual proposals for how to transform key industries: from food, fashion and packaging, to consumer goods and construction.

What can you win?
Next to €5.000 in project funding, winning teams will gain access to an accelerator programme offered by What Design Can Do which will kick-off with a week-long bootcamp in Amsterdam. Here they will receive the expert mentorship, training and tools they need to scale their ideas and expand their impact on the world. All winning teams will also gain valuable press and publicity and get the chance to present their projects during a WDCD Live event in Mexico or Amsterdam.

The Redesign Everything Challenge is open for submissions from 17 January to 13 March, 2024.