Aim
Design is a discipline that applies user, customer, citizen or community-centred approaches to creativity and invention to ensure more successful outcomes. These may include the built environment, physical products, digital, or other services and systems that underpin how we live. Success in this context may mean economic, social, environmental, or a combination of all three.
The Design Generators aim to fund innovative, design-led research projects that contribute to the green transition. They seek to generate new arts and humanities-based approaches and methodologies that harness design to address environmental sustainability, decarbonisation, circular economies, policy design and regenerative practices. Funding will be provided to:
- co-develop interventions with a non-academic partner to assist sustained impact beyond the life of the grant
- engage collaboratively with communities or stakeholders, ensuring relevance and responsiveness to lived experience
- promote green transition-supportive behaviour change, either through deliberative policymaking and (de)regulation or through ‘nudging’
- highlight the value of academic design research in addressing real-world, locally relevant challenges arising along the journey to net zero and a green economy
This round will focus on creating interventions within existing systems. These systems may include, but are not limited to, healthcare, food networks, governance structures, financial infrastructures, and other societal frameworks. We are particularly interested in projects that approach these systems from a community perspective and use design thinking and creative methodologies to identify leverage points for positive change.
Applicants should propose research that is collaborative, community-engaged, and scalable. Projects must be grounded in arts and humanities disciplines, drawing on methodologies including, but not limited to, design research, ethnography, and visual arts. We encourage researchers to work closely with communities, stakeholders and system actors to co-develop interventions that are contextually sensitive and have the potential to be scaled up. These interventions could be scaled up to benefit larger populations, influence policy, or be applied to parallel systems. The aim is to generate new knowledge and prototypes that not only respond to systemic challenges but also reimagine how systems could function more equitably, sustainably, and creatively.
Scope
Projects can be single discipline, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary. The majority of the disciplinary focus of the project must fall within AHRC’s subject remit, see section 7 of the AHRC research funding guide for our remit coverage. Practice-based and practice-led research is supported by this scheme.
Partnerships and collaboration are supported. Applications should articulate how collaborative activity will be conducted, considering good practice in equitable partnerships. Further guidance is available in the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) good research resource hub.
For more information on the background of this funding opportunity, go to the Additional information section.
Duration
The duration of these awards can be between nine to twelve months.
Projects must start by 1 June 2026.
Funding available
The FEC of your project can be between £150,000 and £200,000.
AHRC will fund 80% of the FEC.
What we will fund
Design Generators may support activities that include but are not limited to:
- design research and innovation that prototypes and explores products, services, and systems with users
- creation of multidisciplinary design research capabilities that respond to net zero challenges
- exploration of circular, cyclical, or regenerative business models
- strengthening resilience in third sector and community organisations
- supporting skills transition across sectors and disciplines
- developing policymaking strategies for a green and regenerative economy
- providing training and development opportunities
- facilitating public participation in the research process
- conducting outreach to involve individuals or organisations outside academia in shaping ideas and research
Please note that applications should be specific about the details of the proposed activities, be these coordinated programme activities or a standalone activity.
Projects should demonstrate clear pathways to measurable outcomes of benefit to stakeholders both within the project lifetime and beyond.
An eligible cost would be paying participants for their time to help remove barriers to engagement. Any related costs will be subject to assessment on value for money and appropriateness by assessors. These costs should be listed under Other – Directly Incurred.
Please note that each research organisation, either standard academic research organisations or independent ones, can only submit two applications to this round of funding. AHRC will not enter discussions with any research organisations regarding demand management and how to prioritise their submissions to this round of funding.
What we will not fund
Applications that are not primarily rooted within the design discipline. Applications must comprise, and evidence at least 50% design discipline coverage.
Projects that do not engage directly with the theme or seek to develop a generic approach to a wider green transition challenge will be considered outside the scope of this funding opportunity.
Any costs that do not have a clear rationale or link to the proposed activities, such as vague consultancy fees and unrelated overheads.
Trusted Research and Innovation (TR&I)
UKRI is committed in ensuring that effective international collaboration in research and innovation takes place with integrity and within strong ethical frameworks. Trusted Research and Innovation (TR&I) is a UKRI work programme designed to help protect all those working in our thriving and collaborative international sector by enabling partnerships to be as open as possible, and as secure as necessary. Our TR&I Principles set out UKRI’s expectations of organisations funded by UKRI in relation to due diligence for international collaboration.
As such, applicants for UKRI funding may be asked to demonstrate how their proposed projects will comply with our approach and expectation towards TR&I, identifying potential risks and the relevant controls you will put in place to help proportionately reduce these risks.
See further guidance and information about TR&I, including where applicants can find additional support.
