What Design Can Do Clean Energy Challenge

Design platform What Design Can Do & Ikea Foundation recently launched the Clean Energy Challenge in 5 cities – São Paulo, Delhi, Nairobi, Mexico City and Amsterdam. This global competition calls on designers and creative entrepreneurs to rethink how we produce, distribute and use energy in metropolitan areas.

In Amsterdam’s city centre, packed with monuments and protected buildings, there is little space for clean energy infrastructure. Solar panels and other visible interventions are not permitted on historic buildings. Other infrastructure necessary for the transition, such as electricity substations and transformers, are too big to fit in the narrow and dense urban plan.

Aesthetic concerns play a role in much of the wider metropolitan area, too. The IJmeer lake and on-land ‘buffer’ zones, are used for recreation or transport. Many feel that current visions of clean energy infrastructure development in these areas will make them less attractive or useful for other needs of urban dwellers.

There is not enough space on land nor water to meet the electricity demands for the future of the region through renewable sources. Experts call for an integrative spatial approach whereby clean energy demand is reconciled with other pressing urban needs, such as housing and preservation of cultural heritage and natural landscapes.

Amsterdam’s metropolitan region must cater to a number of growing demands like housing, preserving natural and cultural heritage and redesigning the urban mobility system. Rather than thinking of these as separate systems, design has the power to approach these demands more holistically with multipurpose concepts, products, services, space.

Consider how the energy transition needed can be combined with improved biodiversity, leisure, transport, water storage and agriculture. The degeneration of peat meadows contributes considerably to the CO2-problem and climate change, for instance. Can the energy transition help preserve nature we need in the metropolitan region? Can we design attractive landscapes and multipurpose ‘urban edges’ where clean energy solutions thrive? Clean forms of electricity generation work well as decentralised, small-scale installations. Consider neighbourhood-level interventions to generate and supply energy in the form of electricity, heat or cooling, in beautiful, inspiring and educational ways.

This is why, for the metropolitan region of Amsterdam, we are calling for creative spatial interventions, products, services, systems and stories that reconcile liveability with the need to transition to renewable energy.

Why should I join the challenge?
There are separate tracks for students, creative professionals and start-ups. 25 winners, selected from 5 cities by an international jury, will have a chance to win a production budget and a tailor-made acceleration programme aimed at making the winning ideas, prototypes or start-ups market and investment ready.

Deadline: 5 December 2018.

For more information, please visit the What Design Can Do website.