About - Distributed Design Platform

The Distributed Design Platform acts as an exchange and networking hub for the European maker and design movement. Through carefully curated annual activities, our goal is to support emerging talents, facilitate the acquisition of new skills, foster networking and promotion opportunities, and contribute to the development of a thriving and resilient creative ecosystem.

What is Distributed Design?

Our values

Open

Open refers to the mentality and approach of designers to share and make their design processes transparent, replicable, and accessible, from hardware and software to implementation and usability.
Collaborative

Collaborative means enabling citizens to become active participants in the design process through meaningful and participatory co-design approaches.
Regenerative

Regenerative making and design principles aspire to renew and restore the systems that we are part of, rather than just replacing or devaluing them.
Ecosystemic

Ecosystemic means acknowledging the complexity of interactions between cultural, natural, and social aspects and designing to improve the health of social and environmental systems.

How to become part of the community?

Members

Our platform comprises over 20 members collaborating on the emerging field of Distributed Design. Discover more about our members and learn how you can become part of the ecosystem by clicking here.

Creatives

We take pride in our constantly growing network of creatives who adopt open, collaborative, inclusive and regenerative design practices. Join a devoted community of distributed designers from all over the world here.

Strategic partners

We collaborate with organizations of all sizes, aiming to help them connect with a broader creative audience and achieve various scalable outcomes. These outcomes include creative and digital skill development, immersive learning experiences, and initiatives promoting circular and inclusive design.

Impact

Our achievements over the past three years would not have been possible without the dedication of our 20 members and our vibrant network of Creative Talents. Their work demonstrates an unshakeable commitment to design rooted in environmental and social principles. Practices regularly go beyond sustainability to regeneration: our community asks not only how can we sustain, but how can our design practices give back and nurture cultural, social, and environmental well-being.

Find out more

Advisory board

The Advisory Board provides experience and knowledge to the development of the Platform. It meets two times a year with the members of the project, and where possible they also participate in other events organised by the Platform.

Indy Johar

Mission Steward

Dark Matter Labs
Primavera De Filippi

Researcher at CNRS and Berkman-Klein Center
Daniel Charny

Founder & Director at Forth
Liza Chong

Founder & Director

Design Impact Fund II
Nadya Peek

Director Machine Agency
Guillaume Charny-Brunet

Co-founder of SPACE10
Tomas Diez

Executive Director

Fab City Foundation
Kate Armstrong

Executive Director Interspecies Internet

Distributed design in numbers

Check our impact

Creative Talents

+690

Our achievements over the past years would not have been possible without the dedication of our 20 members and our vibrant network of Creative Talents. Their work demonstrates an unshakeable commitment to design rooted in environmental and social principles. Practices regularly go beyond sustainability to regeneration: our community asks not only how can we sustain, but how can our design practices give back and nurture cultural, social, and environmental well-being.

Core Members

28

Our Platform has seen exciting growth since our start. Since 2022, our membership has steadily increased: the Distributed Design Platform is now made up of 22 members including 6 community hubs. These hubs act as regional centers, fostering connections and knowledge exchange among members with diverse backgrounds and expertise. This geographically distributed network allows for more inclusive participation and ensures that the Platform serves the needs of a wider community.

Global Community

+5900

The Distributed Design Platform acts as an exchange and networking hub for the emerging field of distributed design. The initiative aims at developingand promoting the connection between designers, makers and emerging digital and local markets.

Cross-channel reach

+300k

The DDP website is our primary outreach tool, attracting over 14,000 annual visitors and accounting for 80% of our online engagement and making it our most effective platform. Social media platforms, particularly Instagram (13% of our online outreach), complement this reach.

Who is involved?

The Distributed Design Platform is built upon a unique and highly experienced consortium of 26 members from 15 countries. The project is coordinated by Fab Lab Barcelona and supported in the scientific and technical coordination by IAAC.

Danish Design Center

Website

As Denmark’s national design centre, it is the DDC’s mission to promote the use of design in business and industry, to help professionalise the design industry and to document, promote and brand Danish design in Denmark and abroad. In other words, the DDC aims to ensure the best possible meeting between the supply and demand sides in the design field. The DDC’s key approach in this encounter is systematic experimentation with design-based value creation in companies.

What do they do in the Distributed Design context?

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Happylab Vienna

Website

Since 2010, Happylab is Austria’s first Fab Lab. Learning from each other is an important point in the Happylab community. In addition to the physical meeting place provided for joint working and tinkering, a web-based forum and a wiki page also offer the opportunity to exchange experiences. The Happylab is an interdisciplinary entry point for all who have creative and/or technological project ideas. It is embedded within a framework of universities, business incubators, specialised SMEs, industries to provide the lab users with services when their idea grows beyond the scope of the lab.

What do they do in the Distributed Design context?

Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia
(IAAC)

Website

The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) is a center for research, education, production and outreach, with the mission of envisioning the future habitat of our society and building it in the present. IAAC follows the digital revolution at all scales (from bits to geography, from micro-controllers to cities, from materials to the territory) to expand the boundaries of architecture and design and meet the challenges faced by humanity. IAAC hosts Fab Lab Barcelona, the first and most advanced digital production laboratory in EU.

What do they do in the Distributed Design context?

Maker

Website

Maker is a non-profit association working to foster and test the knowledge, technology, and practices of maker culture. It establishes partnerships and collaborates with peers in the maker community, and organizations from the industry, educational and civic society field on knowledge projects and activities that communicate, broaden and engage a broad target group of citizens in activities around technological trends and tendencies, and hands on making.

What do they do in the Distributed Design context?