World Industrial Design Day: Advancing sustainable innovation with EU-funded projects

World Industrial Design Day, celebrated on 29 June, focuses on raising awareness about the importance of industrial design and its impact on society. It is a day dedicated to promoting the profession and highlighting the contributions of industrial designers to various fields, while encouraging innovation and fostering sustainable development.

EU-funded projects managed by HaDEA are working to improve the industrial design sector to foster economic, social, cultural, and environmental progress. Check below some of these projects and their contributions:

• i-TRIBOMAT is establishing an Open Innovation Test Bed focused on validating and scaling up novel materials. Its purpose is to enable intelligent characterisation of tribological materials and promote innovation within the manufacturing industry in Europe. By integrating tribological testing facilities across the EU with user-friendly IT tools, i-TRIBOMAT aims to facilitate the evaluation of new materials for components. The project’s objective is to minimise expenses and time-to-market during the upscaling process of materials.
• OpenModel’s objective is to develop and maintain a comprehensive open platform for innovation that could offer reliable simulation workflows that seamlessly integrate third-party physics-based models, solvers, post-processors, and databases. By doing so, it can close the gap between industrial challenges and actionable outcomes, empowering businesses to make informed decisions. This platform could be applied across various materials and processing technologies, highlighting its ability to streamline experimental setups, minimise errors, and improve development efficiency.
• VIPCOAT seeks to establish an open innovation platform for engineers to develop coating materials and create accelerated life test scenarios to evaluate their durability. The platform would feature interoperable applications based on standardised ontologies, facilitating knowledge transfer to other industries. By reducing process steps, energy consumption, and resource usage, the platform could enable new production concepts while promoting the development of sustainable, affordable and efficient corrosion-inhibiting coatings.
• MUSICODE aims to create an open innovation materials modelling platform for the organic and large area electronics industry (OLAE). The platform has the objective to provide accurate and insightful information for efficient device manufacturing in OLAE. MUSICODE is looking to optimise materials selection, design, printing, and gas-phase manufacturing in OLAE, while planning to sustain and expand its impact beyond the project.

Background

Horizon 2020 was the EU’s multiannual funding programme between 2014 and 2020. H2020 provided Research and Innovation (R&I) funding for multi-national collaboration projects alongside individual researchers and SMEs via special funding instruments. Horizon 2020 was continued by the Horizon Europe Programme, which will run until 2027.