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 sustainable and just design that contributes to European Green Deal and beyond.
For Bautopia, it brings a scaled-down version of its main exhibition of sustainable design projects, which will be presented at Plex from Thursday to Friday, October 8th and 9th.
The Next Gen Design Exhibition: Futures Worth Living presents 50 outstanding projects selected from the second edition of the Next Gen Design competition, celebrating the forward-thinking visions of a new generation of European designers. Out of more than 190 bold ideas from 29 European countries, an esteemed International Jury — Henriette Waal (The Netherlands), Juan Umbert (Spain), Nikola Radeljković (Croatia), Elli Schindler (Austria), and Emile Smeenk (The Netherlands) — selected projects that go beyond problem solving, challenging existing systems, and reframing our relationship with the world around us.
From reclaiming data sovereignty to designing for co-creation and repairability, from reimagining healthcare and food systems to developing more-than-human approaches to our shared environment, these 50 projects reflect a generation that has inherited profound global challenges — and chosen to respond with clarity, creativity, hope, and conviction. What unites them is a genuine belief that design can be a force for good, and the imagination to prototype meaningful and hopeful futures for people and the planet.
Following the initial stop at Mikser Festival in Novi Pazar (Serbia), the exhibition will tour, in different formats, the major design events across Europe, while also bringing the winning designers together in fully funded, hands-on design sprint residencies, where they form multidisciplinary and multicultural teams to develop innovative responses to local environmental and social challenges. More details on all projects can be found on the Exhibition page on the project website.
Alongside the collaboration with TransEuropa Festival, which will be presenting two workshops in the Bautopia program, this already the second convergence of different Creative Europe-funded projects in this year's Bautopia festival program.
