DESIGN SOCIETY FOND

Their core work

Design Society is a Danish foundation that brings design thinking and co-creation methodologies into EU innovation and policy projects. They specialize in running design-driven processes — sprints, prototyping workshops, user experience research — that help consortia translate research ideas into usable products, services, and policy recommendations. Their work spans circular economy, open source hardware, and SME innovation support, always through the lens of human-centered design and community engagement.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their early H2020 period (2018-2019), Design Society focused on co-design methodologies and their application to policy making and circular economy challenges — working with physical material flows (waste, packaging, plastics, textiles) and urban governance models. By 2020-2022, their focus shifted decisively toward innovation ecosystem tools: open innovation challenges, design sprints for SMEs, randomized control trials to measure design impact, and open source hardware communities. This evolution shows a move from applying design methods within specific sectors toward building and evaluating the infrastructure for design-driven innovation itself.

Design Society is moving toward evidence-based innovation support — using RCTs and observatories to prove that design methods actually work for SMEs, making them a strong partner for projects that need rigorous impact evaluation of innovation interventions.

How they like to work

Design Society operates exclusively as a participant, never coordinating — they join consortia to provide design methodology expertise rather than to lead research agendas. With 92 unique partners across 21 countries in just 7 projects, they work in large, diverse consortia (averaging 13+ partners per project). This broad network suggests they are valued as a specialized methods partner that different types of consortia invite for their co-design and user-centered capabilities.

A well-connected specialist with 92 unique consortium partners spanning 21 countries — an unusually wide network for an organization of their size, reflecting demand for their design methodology expertise across diverse European projects.

What sets them apart

Design Society occupies a rare niche: they are a dedicated design foundation (not a consultancy, not a university) that brings structured co-creation and user-centered design into technical EU projects. Where many partners contribute domain science or engineering, Design Society contributes the process — how to run a design sprint, how to prototype with end users, how to measure whether an innovation intervention actually changed behavior. Their recent move into RCT-based impact evaluation of design methods is particularly distinctive and adds scientific rigor to what is often treated as a soft discipline.

Highlights from their portfolio

• OPEN_NEXT
  Their largest funded project (EUR 531K) and a unique intersection of open source hardware with company-community collaboration — a topic few design organizations work on.
• 200SMEchallenge
  Used randomized control trials to evaluate design-driven innovation challenges for 200 SMEs — rare methodological rigor for measuring design's business impact.
• REFLOW
  Applied design methods to circular economy across 12 material streams (waste, plastics, textiles, water, wood, agrifood), showing their ability to work across diverse industrial sectors.