The second edition of the Next Gen Design Competition invites young designers and thinkers across Europe to engage with a world in flux—and to step in boldly to protect values they stand for and shape what will come next.
If you are aged 18 to 35, born, studying, or living in Europe, this is your moment. Whether you’re an individual innovator or part of a collaborative team, you’re welcome to submit up to five entries showcasing your vision for a sustainable future.
Winning this competition is an entry into a pan-European movement of change-makers. As a winner, your work and your voice will be amplified through The Next Gen Design Traveling Exhibition, The Next Gen Design Digital Showcase, The Next Gen Design Residency Program and The Next Gen Design Residency Awards, with a total prize fund of 2,000 EUR per festival.
Your project should respond to the overarching question: How can design—through objects, systems, spaces, events, technologies, and interactions—enable more just, resilient, and humane futures? Projects may include (but are not limited to):
- Circular, regenerative, and low-impact products and systems: Furniture, lighting, interior elements, tools, and everyday objects designed for longevity, reparability, reuse, material responsibility, and regenerative life cycles.
- Everyday practices rethought: Design solutions addressing daily habits, consumption, accessibility, shared use, and care—particularly in relation to contemporary youth lifestyles and realities.
- Humane and ethical applications of technology: Design projects critically engaging with AI, automation, algorithms, and digital systems—focusing on transparency, agency, fairness, accessibility, and human oversight, rather than efficiency alone.
- Human-centred making, local knowledge, and craft-based innovation: Design approaches that foreground manual processes, craftsmanship, material intelligence, repair, and situated knowledge, emphasising the visible human trace and irreplaceable creative agency—either as standalone practices or in deliberate dialogue with digital, automated, and AI-driven technologies.
- Design for care, inclusion, and wellbeing: Assistive devices, educational tools, mental-health-oriented solutions, disaster-relief designs, and systems that support dignity, accessibility, and collective care.
- Sustainable textiles, wearables, and fashion systems: Garments, footwear, and textile applications grounded in circular materials, ethical production, multifunctionality, repair culture, and alternative fashion economies.
- Housing, shelter, and adaptive spatial solutions: Prefabricated or modular housing, temporary shelters, community spaces, biomaterials, and climate-responsive construction systems.
- Food systems, urban farming, and waste reduction: Designs addressing food production, composting, redistribution, local agriculture, and resource-conscious food practices.
- Platforms and tools for collective action: Digital or hybrid solutions enabling sharing economies, mutual aid, repair networks, civic participation, and community-led initiatives.
- Community-supporting platforms and tools for collective action: Tools, systems, spaces, and participatory frameworks—digital, physical, or hybrid—that strengthen community bonds, foster inclusion and collective agency, enable sharing economies, mutual aid, repair networks, and support community engagement, mobilisation around common-good causes, and meaningful real-life human exchange.
- Nature-integrated and biodiversity-supporting design: Biophilic systems, urban–nature interfaces, and projects that restore ecological relationships and support biodiversity.
- Design for awareness, education, and cultural shift: Campaigns, participatory formats, educational tools, or design-led narratives that foster critical thinking, responsibility, solidarity, and long-term orientation.
Next Gen Design is a three-year program of co-learning, research, design competitions, workshops and exhibitions, connecting 5 prominent European design festivals – Mikser Festival in Belgrade, What Design Can Do in Amsterdam and 3 Design Weeks, in Vienna, Barcelona and Skopje – aiming to encourage young creatives living in Europe to create, adopt and disseminate just and sustainable design that contributes to European Green Deal and beyond.
Please check the official website for further information.
No Entry Fee!
It's free to enter.